By Diana Davis
Last spring, I spent a few months reading and understanding a paper about regular octagons. I spent so much time looking at octagons, drawing octagons, and thinking about octagons, that I started noticing them in my everyday life, where I hadn’t noticed them before. For example, gazebos are usually octagonal:
Has your research led you to notice anything different about the world? (Keep reading for more pictures of octagonal structures.)
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by Alex Levin
At this point in our graduate career, my friends and I are mostly focused on research with our advisers. In particular, for the most part, we are no longer taking classes. As a result, I have noticed that I don’t see them as much as I used to in previous years, when we would all gather to work on problem sets (and when most of us lived in the same graduate dorm). So, I spend a lot more time talking to my friends online than I did before.
Online chat is great in many respects, but I can’t help feeling that I am procrastinating, even if I am not doing it much. However, I have found a way to make online chat both fun and productive: by chatting in a foreign language.
By Brian Simanek
A small group at my University is currently toying with the idea of creating a “math boot camp” for incoming graduate students. This would be a short series of review courses intended to help students brush up on certain mathematical tools and skills. The target audience would be students in the applied sciences (engineering, computer science, etc.) who will be required to take some higher level math in graduate school. Continue reading
by Tyler Clark
At Western Kentucky University, we have had an incredibly long break from classes. Tomorrow is my first day back and I am quite ready to get back in the classroom. (I may change my mind by the end of the week.) In preparation of returning, I decided to listen to some music by The Klein Four. If you have not heard of them, I highly recommend checking them out — they have some entertaining music. My favorite is Finite Simple Group (of order two). I am embedding the YouTube video of it below.
If you know of any other groups or just songs in general that would be entertaining to listen to while taking a break from studying, please share them! I am sure we would all love to have new selections.
While sitting in a coffee shop last week, an estranged economist asked me what the sum of the first n square numbers is. If you already know the formula, proving it is an easy exercise with induction. But how do you create the formula? Below is a Prezi presentation on my favorite derivation of the sum of the first squares.
The point of the presentation is not to show you the construction, though I do enjoy it, but to introduce an alternative to beamer (or power point). Prezi is a web based presentation editor; for the most part it is a virtual poster that you can navigate around. I am new to Prezi so I have not had time to play around, but here is what I think so far. Continue reading
