Teaching, Training, and Advising for the Harvard Mathematics Department. Oh, and some computer stuff.
I had nothing to do with the production of this video, but Robin in my group helped that Stats department with the pre-service training, and they made a summary of what they had learned. Fun stuff.
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Tags: statistics, microteaching, training
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Spirit Airlines is running a promotion based on the Fibonacci Sequence.
Cheapano Fibonacci wants you to take advantage of his latest Fabulous Fibonacci Sale. Fares are as low as $1* each way. …$1, $2, $3, $5, $8, $13, $21, and some $34 and $55 fares must be booked on spiritair.com between 12:00 PM ET on November 13, 2007 and 11:59 PM ET on November 14, 2007 for travel on the dates as specified by individual market and by market direction…. Please see the terms and conditions for complete restrictions and details.
Asterisks abound , and you can’t fly any day you want, but the deal is legitimate. For instance, you can fly (if you book today)
Even though the Fibonacci sequence grows (asymptotically) exponentially, this is still my favorite airline promotion based on an integer sequence.
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That may be good advice for up-and-coming businesspeople, but it’s actually becoming literally a requirement. Apparently the University of Chicago is requiring Business School applicants to submit PowerPoint-Like Slides as part of their application.
“In four slides or less,” the online instructions say, “please provide readers with content that captures who you are.”
Is this a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? Neither, I guess. PowerPoint is a tool, and it can be used for evil as well as good. I hope these applicants read The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint by Edward Tufte. He’s a master of visual expression and has many good points of advice and examples of bad slideshow usage.
The article goes on to say that things may not be as bad as they seem. Applicants are still retaining creativity by submitting poetry, photos, even a play. And the admissions committee says it’s more fun than reading essays.
Bad slideshows aren’t limited to business or government, though. I’ve been to many talks where sitting in the back of the room I couldn’t see the slides because the speaker had crammed so much text onto the page. When that happens, the slideshow becomes distracting.
Instead, I try to put no more than three bullet points on a page. Bullet points shouldn’t be too long; they should only give the next few topics I’m going to talk about. The actual text I want to say goes in a separate document–my notes–which I keep with me (PowerPoint does this for you in the notes pane). If I need to show my audience something more complicated, I put it in a third document–a handout–which I copy and hand out.
I use the excellent beamer class for LaTeX to produce slideshows for my classes. My students love them–it’s a nice resource to have to supplement class notes. I can’t use PowerPoint because of all the equations and mathematical notation I need to put into my slides (don’t you dare say “Equation Editor”), but with beamer I get a nice PDF that I can page through. Hyperlinks in the PDF allow me to jump back and forth, and I can even embed media (not that I have a lot of other media).
Just for laughs: here’s the Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint:
technorati tags:powerpoint, beamer, gettysburg
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Spotted at xkcd this morning:
Makes me think of my Math S-1ab students as I just gave them this classic problem on a midterm:
Show that there is a number c in between 0 and π/2 such that cos(c) = c.
technorati tags:funny, math, comic, xkcd
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I guess I’m lucky that my employer is a tourist attraction. Sometimes it’s mildly annoying to cross campus and be forced to walk in front of three groups taking pictures (as usually happens every lunchtime), but that comes with the territory. Sometimes the interaction is a little more memorable.
Yesterday I came to work at 9am and found the Science Center filled with tourists and their cameras. The lobby of the Science Center is nowhere near the most beautiful locale on campus, but it is open to the public. I found myself prevented from approaching the coffee stand by somebody videotaping a sign with a list of prices. (Literally: “Muffins: $1.79, Scones: $1.79″, etc.).
As I went to the elevator a family was taking pictures. The mother approached me and asked in broken English if I would take a picture with her. I said “sure”, assuming she meant of her and motioned for her husband to give me the camera. No, no, no, she gestured, she wanted her husband to take a picture of herself, her kids, and me. So some family is taking back home a souvenir of me, “an American,” complete with bike helmet, headphones, backpack and duffel bag.
I should have had him take one with my camera, too, and then I could have posted it here and you would have seen how funny it must have looked. Oh, well.
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I got my own digital camera to play with when I picked up the Nikon Coolpix L10 5MP on clearance (90 bucks!) at MicroCenter.
Partly this is for an article I’m writing about Web 2.0 and all the online photoservices (Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook) that are out there. I need some photos which aren’t of my kids to demonstrate with.
But a major reason is to upload this photo which I nominate for “nerdiest pop culture reference with a Brother labelmaker”:
The reference is to Office Space, which makes me happy to be in academia.
technorati tags:brother, stapler, funny, office, space
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Somebody’s uploaded clips from one of my favorite math movies (not a very long list) to Youtube: Donald in Mathmagic Land. It’s a little featurette designed to teach the beauty and usefulness of mathematics. Released in 1959, I have to think that it was part of the space race and math-and-science push spurred by Sputnik.
The first time I saw this movie was as a fifth-grader around 1984, when I was in a summer math class at Black Hawk College in Moline, Illinois. Since then, I’ve probably seen it 30 times.
As president of the undergraduate math club at The University of Chicago, we had an annual Donald viewing with Edwardo’s pizza. Then as a postdoc I found a VHS copy on eBay. Now I try to show it in every class.
The movie has some memorable scenes. The part on the golden ratio is quite interesting, showing first how it’s found in the pentagram, then how that ratio is found in nature. The second most memorable scene is the part about playing billiards “by the diamonds.” You can read the whole plot on Wikipedia if you like, although they seem to suck all the enjoyment out of in that writeup.
It’s quite dated–there are some high-tech items that are genuine artifacts by now, and Donald’s not exactly politically correct. But I’m glad it was made, and I hope it comes out on DVD sometime soon.
technorati tags:math, funny, donald, duck, disney
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In honor of the Math 21b exam today I’ll recycle some of these pictures that seem to have made the rounds on the internet recently, with comments.
Sometimes when we write questions we know exactly what kind of response we want, but our student have not been “trained” in the language we use. Take this one:
The instructor was probably looking for something like “decreasing” or “concave up” but because of the terseness of the wording will never know if the student knows these ideas. Or if the question intends to check the relation between a physical law and a mathematical representation of it, perhaps it would be better to ask, “Explain why the graph is shaped the way it is.”
Another, too-literal response:
Here’s one where the student might have a point:
Now n00b isn’t in the OED but it’s part of the growing online hacking and gaming slang known as Leet. (Although Wikipedia suggests that the more correct antonym would be newb; n00b is more pejorative.) And if the teacher is allowing death and live (not life) to be correct, why not let in this “extended” English word?
Here are some from the “punt with humor” department:
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Poor guy.
Finally, this is the perfect example of the teacher and student completely miscommunicating. The teacher probably had no idea that the question could be interpreted this way:
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I don’t know if Tony Rogers was the first to write this joke, but it’s a good one.
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Tom Dukich has some very cool geeky math pun art, but he also does music. Listen to some of his math sonification songs, like π on the piano (1000 digits of π, each digit with its own note) or “e on the cuica.”
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