by Nicholas Cain
Nick Trefethen is one of those speakers that you only have to hear once to become entirely hooked on his future lectures. I have now attended three lectures in two days, and I have come away from each one with three entirely different and equally awesome ideas. Dr. Trefethen, currently of Oxford university and the President-elect of SIAM, gave a very exciting talk on last week showcasing the new developments of his matlab-based tool suite called chebfun. Continue reading
One of the most important decisions of your graduate career will be the advisor you choose to work with. As a graduate student who has the BEST advisor ever and has seen many of her colleagues struggle with incompatible mentors, here are my Top 7 1/2 Guidelines for choosing an advisor ( I know Top 10 lists are traditional, but I have a class to get to).
#7 Prepare for the unexpected. When you choose your graduate program, make sure there is more than one person working in the field you think you may be interested in. This gives you a choice of people to work with just in case. (Hey buses can hit anyone, right?) Continue reading
by Nicholas Cain
Have you ever played tic-tac-toe? If so, what is the move that Player 1 should make first? If you answered “Go in the middle!”, your’re WRONG. Oh wait, I forgot to tell you, you’re playing this game on a torus. Dr. Jeffery Weeks put on a heck of a show tonight, dazzling the audience of the Pacific-Northwest Section of the Mathematical Association of America with his work creating visualizations and games played on two and three-dimensional tori. Kids young and old were simultaneously educated and entertained, while being hurled in a spaceship (eerily similar to a Tholian Cruiser) through a dazzling 3D rendering of Poincaré Dodecahedral Space. Math educators teaching students of any age should certainly check out Dr. Weeks’ page, if not for new teaching tools then at least for a much needed distraction. Think of it like Portal meets flash games for nerds, who could say no?!
The Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Robin Wilson would like to hear from grad students and post docs who may have done job interviews this year over video, phone, or Skype.
I was recently encouraged to make a professional webpage. A webpage allows people to learn about me and my work before meeting me. This led me to consider what information should be on a professional webpage —and how it should be presented. The webpage of a graduate student can be easy to design and in my experience, there are plenty of mathematicians with adequate knowledge on the subject should you need help designing one. Continue reading
