Posts tagged: teaching

Here are some quick and dirty steps to include an animation in a pdf file. Note that not all pdf readers will support rendering the animation and many of them will show just a static image (likely...

One of the things I'm always told by my colleagues who visit my classes is that I'm dry, serious, and even scary, and that's not how they know me outside classroom. So, I've been working on different...

My friend asked me this: Put balls into $n$ buckets uniformly at random and count $h$ the number of buckets with at least one ball in them. What is the expected value of number of balls $k$?

This past summer I was given a course in introductory linear algebra to teach. The topics of the course, as usual, start from solving systems of linear equations, and then matrices, determinant and...

Andrew Ng in his Corsera course for machine learning provides the following links for resources for Matlab. I have had a terrible time remembering all the syntaxes in matlab (because they are so...

So, bored in a math talk Ulam starts writing integers in a spiral and circling primes. He soon notices something weird:

I recently participated at the Fields Medal Symposium held at the Fields Institute in Toronto, in honour of Martin Hairer, one of the recipients of the medal in 2014. His work revolves around...

In a huge graph, it is hard to determine a bottleneck by just looking at it, or doing any type of search. And by a bottleneck, I mean part of graph that is not very much connected to the other part....

I recently went to a couple of screening which made me really happy.

Without much ado here is a book that is changing my life:

Today I started my linear algebra class by motivating the determinant using a little bit of history and applications. In particular I talked about determinant appearing in the change of variables in...

One of the recent workshops I've attended here at the Taylor Institute was about developing a teaching philosophy offered by Carol Berenson.The goals of the workshop were

One of the things that I always tell my students is to check their solutions when they are done solving a problem. That by itself can mean several things, depending on what the problems is. Of course...

I've been using sage for a while now. I've also been teaching linear algebra for a few years. One of the problems in teaching linear algebra is coming up with a handful of examples of matrices that...

Gershgorin circle theorem roughly states that the eigenvalues of an $n \times n$ matrix lie inside $n$ circles where $i$-th circle is centred at $A{i,i}$ and its radius is the sum of the absolute...

For a given function $f(x)$ around a point $a$, if you zoom in close enough on the graph of the function, you can't tell the difference between the curve and the tangent line to the graph of the...

I mean a list in SAGE. The answer is to

In Theorem 3.1 of "The combinatorial inverse eigenvalue problems: complete graphs and small graphs with strict inequality, W. Barrett, A. Lazenby, N. Malloy, C. Nelson, W. Sexton, Electronic Journal...

If you have a prime number $p$ (other than two and five) then the last digit of $p$ is 1, 3, 7, or 9. If for some reason we believe that prime numbers are randomly distributed (after all, the last...

I went to several talks and meetings in the past few days, and I am going to talk about some of them, but first let me start with some predicting game:

I was watching this random video on youtube (which by the way is not the best video) that I thought maybe I can do the same thing. So, I started coding in Sage. Here is a what I want to do:

I have used several geogebra applets in my calculus class, but there's always things that you wanna do that there's no applet out there for, or you can't modify them etc. So, I decided to write my...

> There is an undoubted relationship between teaching effectiveness and popularity. Certainly, an instructor, who cannot engage in person to person relationships or who would be disliked as an...

Well, I'm planning on taking my Statistics students to a computer lab and introduce SQL to them through Khan Academy's Hour of Code program. What would you do?

> If anything, a continuing over-production of Ph.D.s will only make the problem worse. It creates an ever-growing pool of cheap labor, which administrators are only too happy to employ in place of...

I have students asking me why did we buy this book, and I've always had a hard time understanding that question, let alone answering it in a convincing way. Until I read the following. > "This is why...

It's been almost three weeks (5 days a week, 75 minutes a day) that I am teaching elementary linear algebra, and I can already talk mathematics with my students. It's been very rewarding. I am...

History of Mathematics

The case of the missing fractals