Parting Wisdom

Posted on June 3, 2012 by Brian Simanek

My graduate student career is drawing to a close, and as such this will be my final post to this blog as a graduate student.  In this post, I want to share some brief words of wisdom that have been very helpful to me when making important decisions over the past five years.  During my graduate student orientation, I attended many information sessions on a variety of topics, but the one memorable comment was made by an experienced graduate student (not in mathematics) who said to all of us “you are an exceptional student but you are probably not the exception.” Continue reading →

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Letter from the Editor-in-Chief

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Tyler Clark

AMSBlogDear Readers,

I have just completed my MS in math at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, KY. I will be beginning my PhD at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, FL. I have been at WKU since 2007 and have only lived in KY. I look forward to learning from this experience and hopefully carrying that insight over to my blog articles.

A big thanks to everyone who reads the blog for making our jobs as editors of the AMS Graduate Student Blog so fun and fulfilling. Back in April, we reached a record high with 521 views on a single day and 9,326 views for the month of April. Please help us to continue this trend by making sure you visit the blog frequently to check out new content and suggesting the blog to others. You can also follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/#!/amsgradblog) or subscribe to our blog updates via email (http://mathgradblog.williams.edu/subscribe-ams-grad-blog-email/).

Thanks to all of the editors of the blog and Dr. Frank Morgan (blog advisor) for all of their hard work. I’d like to give a special thanks to Luke Wolcott for his service to the blog. Luke has just completed his thesis and has resigned as editor of the blog. He will be doing a Postdoc at the IST in Lisbon, Portugal, after a summer overland trip through West Africa. We wish him the best of luck in his plans after graduation. Check out Luke’s past posts at http://mathgradblog.williams.edu/author/wolcott/.

As always, if you have topics you would like to see posts about or you are interested in writing for the blog, feel free to email me at tyler.clark@knights.ucf.edu.

Tyler Clark
Editor-in-Chief

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Math Flash Cards

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Tyler Clark

flashcardunderwoodI was looking online for some LaTeX flashcard templates the other day and came across some nice flashcards by Jason Underdown at The University of Utah. (Find them at http://www.math.utah.edu/~jasonu/flash-cards/.) He has both math and physics flash cards on his website. The math cards include Calculus I, Linear Algebra, Abstract Algebra, Real Analysis I Definitions, Real Analysis I Theorems, Probability, and Topology. The physics cards include Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Statistical Mechanics, Electrodynamics, and Quantum Mechanics.

These flash cards are conveniently business card size. This makes it quite easy to print on business card paper from any office supply store and carry them with you wherever you would like. Jason was also kind enough to provide the LaTeX file for each of the flashcard sets. I will definitely be making some flash cards for some of my classes and also passing these along to my students.

Do you know of any other good flashcard sets that have already been created? Please share your card sets if you make some.

Posted in AMS, Mathematics Online, Teaching | 1 Comment

A look at the word “average”

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Jean Joseph

http://myscenario.com/?p=2791

Related to the symptomatic overuse of percentage in modern articles is the somewhat obscure use of the word “average.” This word is used in so many instances that it seems it has blended, in a rather subtle way, into the fabric of what one would call a well-informed educated opinion. From my experience, whether from people’s speech or from articles, I have the impression that anytime some cogency is sought in an argument about people, which can be a very tricky business, a safe move, safer than blatantly using the word “most” when the totality is not even known, is to use “average.” Let us look at some examples: in this blog, it is mentioned, “It is time the average American had a voice and here it is”; on the Census Bureau website, one can read “The “average American” makes 11.7 moves in a lifetime (based upon current age structure and average rates of moving by age between 1990 and 1993).” Another one is “The average family of four can use 400 gallons of water every day, and, on average, approximately 70 percent of that water is used indoors.” Or “There is an average of 207,754 victims (age 12 or older) of sexual assault each year” (http://www.rainn.org/statistics ). If one browses the net, a rather large number of similar examples can be found.

Continue reading →

Posted in AMS, General, Math, Mathematics in Society | 1 Comment

Conference Listings

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Tyler Clark

AMSBlogYou may have noticed the new conferences page on the blog. This page allows readers to suggest conferences to be added to the calendar. Furthermore, we have a list of upcoming conferences and a calendar of upcoming conferences.

Right now, we do not have many conferences listed. Please give us suggestions on conferences of interest to graduate students in mathematics.

Posted in Announcement, General, Math | Comments Off on Conference Listings