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# Posts

### October 25, 2014

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Panorama from Point Sublime [Grand Canyon] – Printed by Julius Bien [1882] If you want to know about Protoliths, Abyssoliths, Xenoliths and Tectonic Knots, of index fossils, totemic assemblages of ophiolitic Serpentine, of erratic stones and aesthonspheric calligraphy, geochronology, abyssal plains and gravity maps, you might do well to journey with John Mcphee over the […]
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Reference: Moore, Thomas A., A General Relativity Workbook, University Science Books (2013) – Chapter 21, Problem 21.9. The Einstein equation is Up to now, we’ve usually taken , since we know from the Newtonian limit that must be very small. If , the Newtonian limit becomes so acts as a negative mass density, that is, […]
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10 / 2 = 5 * 1^4 Also: 10 - 2 - 5 = |1 - 4| Also: 10 / (2 * 5) = 1^4 Also: 102 (mod 5) = 1 * √4
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Recall that in the Baron's latest game, for a cost of one coin, Sir R----- could roll two dice and have from the Baron coins equal in number to the best of them. In return, the Baron would have from Sir R----- coins equal to the roll of a solitary die.
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One of the primary goals this year is to find opportunities to use rates in a more practical setting. This past week my classes started to explore rates in more detail.  Students studied visual patterns and rules last week and this has led up to using/converting rates with formulas. While planning I dug out a […]
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You guys know how much Aunt Pythia loves you, right (answer: a ton)? OK, good. Because that means I can be honest with you. The truth is, I’ve been getting some very weird questions recently, and I’ve had to throw out a bunch of them, sifting through the weeds to find some tulips. It’s not […]
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I’m going to make a costume pattern to sell.  People can buy my plan and make awesome, long, full, scary, ghost costumes.  This scheme will be so simple.  Perhaps I’ll get rich! In this activity young students can reason about…Read more →
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There is a very interesting discussion about formalized mathematics going on the Foundations of Mathematics mailing list. The most interesting part of it (at least to me) is the thread about relative merits of Homotopy Type Theory (HoTT) and set theory (ZFC) as foundations for formalized mathematics. I should probably write what is Homotopy Type […]
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Ayer viernes se publicaron las terceras clasificaciones parciales de los Premios Bitácoras 2014, en los que Gaussianos participa en la categoría Mejor Blog de Ciencia. En dicha categoría Gaussianos sube de la quinta a la cuarta posición. Los cinco primeros puestos son los siguientes: Ciencia de sofá Cuentos Cuánticos Dimetilsulfuro Gaussianos La pizarra de Yuri […]Entra en Gaussianos si quieres hacer algún comentario sobre este artículo, consultar entradas anteriores o […]
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Here is a piece of evidence which those who think that mathematics is invented rather than discovered will like. This concerns definitions. I wrote last year about the definitions of a group, a matroid, the real numbers, and primitivity. In … Continue reading →
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MathML on Wikipedia
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Are airport screenings for Ebola really an effective way of stopping transmission of the disease? And as the United Nations asks for another \$1bn (£625m) in aid we take a look at which governments and charities are rallying to the cause and which are not. This programme was first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
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Cet automne 1943, les maquisards de la compagnie Bernard sont installés dans le massif de Belledonne. Une petite histoire de Résistance, de mathématique et d'enseignement. - Mathématiques ailleurs / Piste verte, featured
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Given a regular n-gon P1P2P3…Pn. Let point O be the center of this polygon. If we take arbitrary point P in the plane, prove that \$ latex |PP1|^2\$+|PP2|^2+|PP3|^2+…+|PPn|^2=n|PO|^2+n. Hint: Complex numbers make this problem easier!
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Another post from Tap Into Teen Minds. Enjoy! This multi-question 3 Act Math Task incorporates important concepts related to ratios, percentages and proportional reasoning when we enlarge a cheque. The post Big Cheques [3 Act Math Task] appeared first on Tap Into Teen Minds.
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I don't know about you, but my experiences with even the best Shell Centre tasks (their Formative Assessment Lessons, or "FALs") have been hit or miss. These are among the best anywhere, and while I generally love the ideas of their tasks, in practice, I almost always need to tweak their implementations to make them work in my classroom and with my students.I wonder if this is not inevitable, given the highly customized nature of scaffolding.I experienced this phenomenon yet again […]
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I’ve been doing some work with Focused Objective lately, and today the following question came up in our discussion. If you’re sampling from a uniform distribution, how many samples do you need before your sample range has an even chance of covering 90% of the population range? This is a variation on a problem I’ve […]
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Here’s my second reflective post for Imogen Dunne’s final year project (you can find the first here). We are now at the end of Week 4 of the course and I’m glad to say that I think overall things are going well. My office hours have gotten very busy. This is awesome. Students are coming to see me, genuinely having struggled with concepts and this is often a result of myself or another tutor identifying specific issues in a lab session and saying something like: […]

### October 24, 2014

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in praise of wallowing in the middle of stuff -- marinating, versus just discoveringAs much as I love discovery learning, there is a dirty little secret I really hate to have to admit: discovery is, in some ways, a cheap thrill.It's easy to get excited about something new. It's harder to get enthusiastic for the middle. And this creates problems when it comes to developing fluency and deep conceptual understanding. I think that's why my students (who are all superb students, probably in the top […]
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Unfortunately what is little recognized is that the most worthwhile scientific books are those in which the author clearly indicates what he does not know; for an author most hurts his readers by concealing difficulties. E. TorricelliThe 298th day of the year; If you multiply 298 by (298 + 3) you get a palindromic number, 89,698. Can every number be similarly adjusted to make a palindrome?EVENTS1666 William Lilly, astrologer, was called before the House of Commons to explain the embarrassing […]
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Wieslawa Szymborska (1923 –2012)                               Ανάλεκτα Σαββάτου,ολίγον μεταμεσονύκτια καθώς η τράπεζα θεμάτων στην άλγεβρα της Α Λυκείου αναβαθμίστηκε και έπρεπε άμεσα να λυθούν τα νέα θέματα.Όπως και να έχει,στα διαλείμματα των […]
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Come ero solito dire,la rivoluzione capita difficilmente a quelli di una certa età, perchè hanno viaggiato sullo stesso vecchio binario troppo a lungo e così, quando lo scambio sornione arriva, loro perdono l'occasionee prendono il binario sbagliato mentre l'allegro ultimo vagone svolazza viae il conduttore del vapore non riconoscegli slogan di un tempoe i vecchi corrono sullo sperone rossiccio che termina nell'erba morta dove giacciono manifesti di […]
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Yet another book I grabbed on impulse while in Birmingham last month. And which had been waiting for me on a shelf of my office in Warwick. Another buy I do not regret! Rivers of London is delightful, as much for taking place in all corners of London as for the story itself. Not mentioning […]
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What parking spot number is the car parked in? Share:
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An informal summary of a recent project I had some involvement in. Motivation: Why care about Metric Learning? In many machine learning algorithms, such as k-means, Support Vector Machines, k-Nearest Neighbour based classification, kernel regression, methods based on Gaussian Processes etc etc – there is a fundamental reliance, that is to be able to measure […]
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My Ph.D. student Silas Johnson just posted his thesis paper to the arXiv, and it’s cool, and I’m going to blog about it! How should you count number fields?  The most natural way is by discriminant; you count all degree-n number fields K with a given Galois group G in S_n and discriminant bounded in […]
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Thursday was gorgeous.  A road trip north to our state capitol, Frankfort, with my husband and my superintendent. Ashland Inc. Teacher Achievement Awards…and I was 1 of 24!!!  I debated on whether or not to post, but I am proud of my work in education and why not celebrate it!  I teared up multiple times […]
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Introduction As winter comes, I often see homes where gaps develop in the wood flooring, molding, or ceilings (Figure 1). While I have never actually spent any time investigating the mechanism of wood’s movement or magnitude, I see its affect … Continue reading →
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I just found out about a draft version of "Foundations of Data Science" a new book by John Hopcroft and Ravindran Kannan and very much like chapter 7 through 10 that touches upon themes we talk about often here on Nuit Blanche: Compressive Sensing ( see also The Big Picture in Compressive Sensing) , Advanced Matrix Factorization (see also the Advanced Matrix Factorization Jungle Page), complexity, streaming/sketching issues and Randomized Numerical Linear Algebra, Machine Learning and […]
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Another jumble of links from the week gone by: 1)  Okay, he may not be Martin Gardner, but Mike Lawler has been compiling quite a body of digital work week after week after week (both written and video). I'm astounded by his output, and don't even have time to catch it all, but here's one contribution from last week (...and seriously, if you're a math teacher or a parent you ought be FOLLOWING