As we welcome a new Editor-in-Chief Matthew Simonson, I want to express my admiration and gratitude to the outgoing Editor Tyler Clark, who over the past three and a half years has made the Graduate Student Blog what it is today. May happiness and success follow him wherever he goes.
Frank Morgan, Publisher
A new school year is upon us, bringing new classes to teach or to take, depending on your year, new classmates to mentor or intimidate, depending on your mood, and in the illustrious high-paying danger-and-intrigue-filled world of grad student math blogs, a new editor-in-chief. Our outgoing editor-in-chief Tyler Clark of crossword-puzzle-making fame left big shoes to fill, and thus I hope that those of you who have been active on the blog in the past, as well as those discovering it for the first time, will join me in making it a success. If you are currently a masters student, PhD student, postdoc, person with valuable advice to share with the aforementioned shady characters, or just a lost soul in math or some math-esque discipline, come write for us! You could even earn yourself a coveted spot on our world famous “AMS Grad Student Blog Editorial Board,” guaranteed to earn you fortune and fame. Please contact me using the form below this post.
To kick off the new year (school year, Congressional fiscal year, Jewish/Gujarati/French Revolutionary calendar year, etc.), I’ll present a new type of puzzle. And by new, I mean new to most of you, I hope: Continue reading
This crossword is in a different format from the previous puzzles. I hope you enjoy it. Let me know what you think! The password to the answer key is math1.
Coming into grad school, I had little experience communicating mathematics to students who were not already committed to learning the material and minimal background in educational pedagogy. This post is all about how I dealt with one problem this semester.
For the spring term, I led recitation sections for a calculus class designed for students in business or the social sciences. Things I anticipated: derivatives, integrals, students asking why they need to learn this material, and probably a general disinterest in mathematics. Things I did not anticipate: their extremely narrow zone between boredom and anxiety.
“People you may know.” “Other products you may like.” “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…” We’ve all seen these suggestions when browsing the web, be it on Facebook or Amazon or some other platform. But how do the sites come up with these recommendations? Sometimes they seem very far off (why should I become friends with someone when we only have one mutual friend?) to eerily tailored (how did you know my favorite band!?!?). This area of research falls under the broad category of recommender systems.
