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# Posts

### October 01, 2014

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Mt. Washington, NH Fall is a beautiful time of year for hiking. Many students will be walking in the woods and mountains to enjoy the colorful leaves and the cool weather outside.  Let them combine what they are doing with…Read more →
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Today in my college algebra class will be the first time that I've provided space to actually discuss the 1 = 0.999... issue. Previously I mentioned this here on the blog. This become so contentious that it's actually the only post on which I've ever been forced to shut off comments. (Actually it attracted a stalker who'd post some aggressive nonsense every few days.) Anyway, brushing up on some points for later today let me see a very obvious fact that I'd overlooked before and that is: […]
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“We do these things… not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” – John F. Kennedy I love a challenge. I go out of my way to do Hard Sums in my head, in the hope of one day matching the Mathematical Ninja’s prowess. I run long distances. I juggle childcare with a tutoring business. I work with children, as a choice. Difficult things? I love them. But they’re no way to run an education system. I genuinely can’t believe I have to write a blog post explaining to the […]
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I just compiled a list of a few preprints and papers that recently came out in support of hyperspectral work and its relation to either compressive sensing or advanced matrix factorization. Without further ado:Self-Dictionary Sparse Regression for Hyperspectral Unmixing: Greedy Pursuit and Pure Pixel Search are Related by Xiao Fu, Wing-Kin Ma, Tsung-Han Chan, José M. Bioucas-DiasThis paper considers a recently emerged hyperspectral unmixing formulation based on sparse regression of a […]
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I had a busy summer. In August my family and I moved from Lehavim to Rosh Pina. In September my family grew: my daughter Sarah was born two days before the (Hebrew) new year. There is a lot of excitement and happiness around this, but this blog is not the place to expand. What I […]
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In a nutshell, the traveling salesman problem is as follows: "Given a list of cities and the distances between each …Tags: simulation, traveling salesman
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8775 = 3 x 3 x 3 x 5 x 5 x 13.8775 = (25 x 26 x 27)/2 (A027480).8775 divides 8212 - 1.8775 is a number that cannot be written as a sum of three squares.Source: OEIS
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I was recently asked to be part of an advice panel for newly minted teaching assistants. Oh, how time flies! After assisting with numerous classes and teaching vector calculus twice, I’d like to think I have some advice to offer. … Continue reading →
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Why don’t you stop doodling and start writing serious posts in your blog? (Cecilia, my beautiful wife) Choose a function, apply it to a set of complex numbers, paint  the result using the HSV technique and be ready to be impressed because images can be absolutely amazing. You only need ggplot2 package and your imagination. This is what happens […]
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Check out this video on Lucas Numbers: Lucas Numbers are an interesting generalization of the famous Fibonacci Numbers! Featured book: Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci Also, check out this book by Matt Parker, i.e. the guy in the video above! … Continue reading →
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With the new era of technology, Mathematics has become a great tool for arts and entertainment. With the use mathematical algorithm of wolfram alpha, they were able to arrive with an equation for the images of... The post Equations of Picachu appeared first on Techie Math Teacher.
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Ce mois-ci, les médailles Fields font reparler d'elles de Paris à Rio. Les actions grand public se multiplient de la maison Fermat au château de Guédelon. Les expérimentations pédagogiques s'appuient sur les plateformes en ligne ou la pédagogie inversée. Le cinéma célèbre Alan Turing, la recherche s'applique aux chiens de berger, aux empilements d'oranges, à la dynamique des populations. Et la rentrée littéraire nous offre une foison de lectures autour des mathématiques. On vous […]
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(Click on the comic if you can't see the full image.) (C)Copyright 2014, C. Burke.Have you ever known anyone who just does the chant waiting for someone to jump in with the words. Have you ever been that person? Flowcharting: a lost art. It doesn't have to be complicated, but ti shouldn't be too "clever", either. Mostly, it should be readable so people in your audience can understand it (not everyone involved in a project is an expert coder). Readability, and easy understanding, are why I […]
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The (presumably) final article arising from the Polymath8 project has now been uploaded to the arXiv as “The “bounded gaps between primes” Polymath project – a retrospective“.  This article, submitted to the Newsletter of the European Mathematical Society, consists of personal contributions from ten different participants (at varying levels of stage of career, and intensity […]
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This is interesting [if you get a chance, listen to the audio at the link]“By the end of the age of three, children who are born into poverty will have heard 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers,” says Dr. Dana Suskind [A pediatric otolaryngologist at University of Chicago -- MP].Dr. Dana Suskind is the director of the Thirty Million Words initiative – an education and research program out of Chicago....The moment a baby is born their brain is already beginning to […]
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For every action, there shall be a vicious and disproportionate reaction. Continue reading →
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I bet you have all seen the following mistake: There’s a problem here, but it’s certainly an understandable problem. It comes from, dare I say, a trick that we all teach. And it’s a trick we all think isn’t one – adding the same thing on both sides of the equation. When I did my […]
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Algomation animated algorithms (G+)Rush hour video, or, what our robot-driven future will be like (G+)The Washington Post rants about those evil student pirates, but neglects to mention the free alternatives (G+)A song video about knots, from the low-dimensional topology blog (G+)Fun hex grid facts, via MF (G+)SODA 2015 accepted papers (G+)KaTeX, a lobotomized but fast web math renderer (G+)Against laptops in lectures, via MF (G+)David Wade’s ‘Fantastic Geometry’ – The Works of Wenzel […]
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Warning – venting ahead… My Algebra 1 students today had a class-wide reassessment over three learning targets: solving linear equations, solving linear inequalities, and solving formulas for a specified variable. I had rearranged my units this year so that the unit with solving equations and inequalities was first since on the initial benchmark I gave, …Continue reading
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This is the current installment of the monthly series “Game Theory in the News” and it will cover stories from the last month of September. My hope is to highlight stories that can be used as case studies in the classroom, both so students can see how to apply game theory and so teachers can […]
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No summary available for this post.
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I have seen students whose confidence is so shaken by calculus or algebra that adding small numbers is no longer certain....the reptilian brain kicks in even basic operations become difficult...too much stress or anxiety and you can literally do about two things: fight or flee. This is why in martial arts you fight calmly and better yet with no conscious mind....otherwise the reptile kicks in and you can't remember what to do even if you have practiced for certain situations 1000 times. I […]
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This image created by Christopher Culter shows the compact abelian group of 2-adic integers (black points), with selected elements labeled by the corresponding character on the Pontryagin dual group (colored discs).
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I saw this neat interview with Terry Tao yesterday: In the first paragraph he mentions that he thinks that number theory isn’t likely to become an important subject in school math because it doesn’t have lots of applications.  I’m sure … Continue reading →
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Another TEDTalk today. This is actually from 2013, but I just saw it getting passed along #MathChat/#EdChat circles today. It's about success in math and beyond. If you missed it, set aside 6 mins. for it:
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The Major League Baseball postseason is starting just as I write this. From the National League, we have Washington, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. From the American League, we have Baltimore, Kansas City, Detroit, Los Angeles (Anaheim), and Oakland. These match up pretty well geographically, and this hasn’t gone unnoticed: see for […]
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Today wiped me out. I had all 3 sections of AP Stats today, and I heard the same comment from all 3 classes. It went something like this, “I never understood the z score when we did it in Alg 2. My teacher just said, memorize the formula and get find the number.” Sigh. That […]
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Some of my favorite conversations are about prediction and its limits. For some, this is purely a practical topic, but for me it is a deeply philosophical discussion. Understanding the limits of prediction can inform philosophy of science, mind, and even questions of free-will. As such, I wanted to share with you a World Science […]
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Mathematics and Computers in Simulation, Volume 104, pages 1-104 (Oct-14)
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Discrete Applied Mathematics, Volume 176, pages 1-134 (Oct-14) Edited by Francesc Comellas, Robert Elsasser, Dragan Stevanovic