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# Posts

### May 23, 2015

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I had the chance to attend the Canon Media Awards Night, as a guest of the Science Media Centre (who are one of the sponsors). It was a good year for data journalism.  Harkanwal Singh and his team won “Best use of interactive graphics” and “Best multimedia storytelling” for projects based on effective communication of publicly-available data. Perhaps more importantly […]
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Here are the slides of the talk I’m giving on Monday to kick off the Categorical Foundations of Network Theory workshop in Turin: • Network theory. This is a long talk, starting with the reasons I care about this subject, and working into details of one particular project: networks in electrical engineering and control theory. […]
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Even after the Snowden revelations, there remained one big mystery about what the NSA was doing and how.  The NSA’s classified 2013 budget request mentioned, as a priority item, “groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit internet traffic.”  There was a requested increase, of several hundred million dollars, for “cryptanalytic IT services” and “cryptanalysis and […]
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A correspondent writes (I added the links):Our district is looking at revamping our year map and I would like to suggest a map that has the qualities of Algebra: Themes, Tools, Concepts (ATTC): particularly its ‘integratedness’ and how well it spirals through the topics.  I’ve read on your blog about separating topics and lagging homework.  But what are some things one might consider when deciding what the next week’s topic would be (or what topics to put in what […]

### May 22, 2015

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(a symbol) We can repudiate completely and which we can abandon without regret because one does not know what this pretended sign signifies nor what sense one ought to attribute to it. Cauchy in 1847 in regard to the square root of negative one..The 143rd day of the year; there are 143 three-digit primes. Also, 1432 is a divisor of 143143. HT to Matt McIrvin who found the pattern for numbers such that n^2 divides n.n (where the dot represents concatenation) and then […]
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We are in the middle of moving and I just for now don’t have access to my compute that has Mathematica. I hadn’t really worried too much about it since we really only use it for 3D printing projects, but guess what . . . I was reading through this book in the library today:…
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This morning, on my way to the airport (and to Montpellier for a seminar), Rock, my favourite taxi-driver, told me of a strange ride he endured the night before, so strange that he had not yet fully got over it! As it happened, he had picked an elderly lady with two large bags in the […]
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via TrigonometryIsMyBitch
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PROPs were developed in topology, along with operads, to describe spaces with lots of operations on them. But now some of us are using them to think about 'signal-flow diagrams' in control theory---an important branch of engineering. I talked...
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Cubistic Singularity   by Ivan Doncevic   http://im-possible.info/english/art/pencil/ivan-doncevic.html#cubistic-singularity   Author - http://webbugt.deviantart.com/
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June is just a couple of days away and the holiday season is not an excuse to forget about math. I know that summer is the time when we forget about school, but for me it is also the time to visit a little more and see how cities around the world embrace the beauty […]
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Unizor - Creative Minds through Art of Mathematics - Math4TeensProblemConstruct a common perpendicular h to two given skew lines a and b.AnalysisAssume a common perpendicular h to skew lines a and b is constructed. Let points of its intersection with these lines be A and B correspondingly. Then h must be an intersection of two planes: plane σ that is perpendicular to line a at point A and plane τ that is perpendicular to line b at point B:σ⊥a; A∈στ⊥b; B∈τh = σ∩τWe don't know […]
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$\begin{array}{c}345 - 158 = 345 - 100 - 50 - 8\\ = 245 - 50 - 8\\ = 245 - 45 - 5 - 8\\ = 200 - 5 - 8\\ = 195 - 8\\ = 187\end{array}$ $\begin{array}{c}345 - 158 = 245 - 58\\ = 195 - 8\\ = 187\end{array}$Why do both look correct on PC but only one on iPhone?
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$\newcommand{\PG}{\text{PG}}$ Denser than a Geometry Hello everyone. In my last post, I discussed an unavoidable minor theorem for large matroids of density greater than $\binom{n+1}{2}$, which as a consequence characterised exactly the minor-closed classes of matroids that grow like the the graphic … Continue reading →
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The Current Population Survey provided reliably comparable data on the number of uninsured Americans--until last year.
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The recent story about the retracted paper on political persuasion reminded me of the last time that a politically loaded survey was discredited because the researcher couldn’t come up with the data. I’m referring to John Lott, the “economist, political commentator, and gun rights advocate” (in the words of Wikipedia) who is perhaps more well […] The post John Lott as possible template for future career of “Bruno” Lacour appeared first on Statistical […]
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This semester had, hands-down, the best set of students I’ve ever had. Every semester I do a post-mortem of what worked and what didn’t and how consistent those things have been over the years. Though, mostly irrelevant to this article, but to give a frame of reference, this semester I taught a once-a-week low-level, introductory […]
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Wow! I was going to write a comment synthesizing the very generous thoughts and ideas in response to my last post, but the meta-comment got to be almost as long as the original post, so... here I am. Several categories of possible actions jump out to me:Representing the incorrect idea: By not putting this idea on the board, I'm subtly signaling that it's wrong, or in some way not worth recording. This occurred to me-- which is why I attempted to record the idea of a unit rate by writing 1 hour […]
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This lesson will extend the concept of selections and, in particular, will talk about the number of ways to select any number of objects from ‘n’ distinct objects. Let’s go back to color mixing! Suppose you have the following three colors with you: And you wish to make as many different colors as possible by […]
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I’ve been on both sides of this conversation. And this discussion can get heated. Do we tell students what we want them to know? Do we let them explore? Do we let the students develop their own understanding? Do we model proper techniques for the students? And this isn’t a particularly new debate.  John Dewey […]
Editor's Pick
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Viral Math, Part Deux: Terrance F. Ross:Singapore’s mind-bending logical riddles are so last month. Enter: Vietnam, the latest country to be swept up in what could easily be known as “the viral-math epidemic of 2015.”
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I found this blackboard in the maths common room of Lafayette College, a beautiful old campus university near the small town of Easton (just north of Philadelphia in the US). While the board contains some nice mathematics, I was particularly taken by the psychedelic fractal border on top of the board. I believe this was […]
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KrazyDad is a website choc full of mathematics based puzzles Many of these were featured in my blog post about maths puzzles a few months ago.
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I discovered a picture of me in my student lab – one of the students optimized me for a class project using dominos(!)  My second blog post ever was about Bob Bosch’s optimization art – see some of his domino art here. It’s worth revisiting opt art. Bob Bosch wrote about his domino optimization models […]
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Another teacher and I started a math-science journal at my school three years ago. We’ve built it up to the point where it is very student-run, and we teachers truly are advisers. Today we had our launch event for the journal, and it is the current issue is now “live.”  I’m so proud of the kids […]
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When I wanted to show you a code snippet in the past, I displayed the code in the text of my blog post.... read more >>
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Welcome to my latest instance of Math for Kids! Today I had the pleasure to make an interactive mathematical presentation at my son’s school to the 7th / 8th grade Math Team, about 30 math-enthusiastic kids (twelve and thirteen years … Continue reading →
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Last Thursday, at the OAME 2015 math conference, I presented a double-session entitled Rethinking Math Class. I am going to try to recap it here, as best I can, with links to everything! So expect this to be a long post...First, we played Quadratic Headbanz, which I have blogged about here. Given that 64 people had signed up for my session I had to make a second set of headbanz. As my original set featured equations I decided to make the second set with graphs which you can get here. As it […]
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