Thoughts on chemistry, general science, and whatever else is banging around in my mind.
Thoughts on chemistry, general science, and whatever else is banging around in my mind.
Writing centers are nearly ubiquitous on college and university campuses. Typically, students can bring in a piece of writing and have someone help them improve it: from catching typos or grammar errors to restructuring the text to strengthen the main argument. I wish for an equivalent Math Center.
Read MorePlaying Alto's Adventure last night, it struck me that I'm learning. It doesn't always feel like learning, though.
I think there are some lessons in teaching we might take from the game design of Alto's Adventure.
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The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity, by Steven Strogatz
Steven Strogatz, a mathematics professor at Cornell, had a math blog (On the Elements of Math) at the New York Times for a while in 2010. This is a collection of those blog posts edited into book form.
I read On the Elements of Math when it was new. The topics were varied and interesting,and the writing was clear. It was equally fun to review things I knew (e.g. explaining the Pythagorean theorem by drawing squares on the triangle's sides) and learn about things I hadn't encountered before (e.g. the Hilbert Hotel problem). I enjoyed it and was sorry to see it come to an end.
It has been a few years since then, and I had forgotten the specifics of the blog when I picked up The Joy of x. (It was kind of interesting just to see which parts I recalled versus what felt like new material.) The topics are still interesting, the stories are still chosen well, and the writing is still clear. I think I enjoyed the first few chapters again as much as I had when I'd read them in blog-post form.
But by the fourth or fifth chapter, my enthusiasm started to lag.
The chapters were starting to sound the same. They had essentially the same structure: identify a potential limitation of math, relate anecdote or pop culture reference, explain the problem in the story, end with a punch line. The chapters are short, so it's easy to run through the pattern several times in one sitting, and it gets repetitive quickly.
I set the book aside and read something else. When I did pick it up again, I read only a chapter at a time and found it much improved. It was like returning to the blog: only one post at a time and a break between one and the next. It's a funny way for me to read a book,1 but it worked.
It's a fun survey of mathematics by someone who obviously loves the subject. No math expertise is necessary to follow along. Read it a bit at a time, like it was originally delivered.
1: I'm a devourer, a binge-reader. I have been known to read lengthy series in a week or weekend and I read the final Harry Potter book in a single sitting the night I bought it. Reading a book in little bites is not like me.
I saw this in my Facebook feed, and instead of finding it cute, I found it a frustrating and disheartening display of innumeracy. The comments were full of "Oh wow! It worked for me," and "That's crazy!"
No, it's not crazy, it's not magic, it's math. Of course it worked for you because it's just an algebra trick, and not a particularly exciting one. Much more interesting than the trick is how it works and what its limitations are.
Read MoreThoughts on chemistry, general and everyday science, and whatever else is banging around in my mind