Revealing the mysteries of mathematics
We have all been there … sitting in a mathematics class wondering “will this knowledge ever actually be useful?” As a teacher, I have been asked the question more times than I can remember.Russell Lim - High School Mathematics Teacher, Melbourne, Australia The title of this editorial is taken from Mr. Lim's submission to Medium. I... Continue Reading →
In the movie Animal House, when Lawrence "Pinto" Kroger and Kent "Flounder" Dorfman walk past the statue of Emil Faber, founder of Faber College, we see that his motto is "KNOWLEDGE IS GOOD". Breadth and Depth of Knowledge Knowledge is good, but what about understanding and wisdom? (The editorial, Purpose of this Website, elucidates the... Continue Reading →
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, wrote Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. The title of this editorial is a quote by the White Knight who is is a daydreaming inventor, a foolish and awkward man who is... Continue Reading →
There is much being said about data science and becoming a data scientist, Big Data, the Internet of Things, Deep Learning, and Artificial Intelligence. The question is how do I become a data scientist and what is involved in learning data science. There are 6 steps to learn Data Science4: General Data ScienceStatisticsPythonR ProgrammingMachine LearningData Visualisation What is... Continue Reading →
I couldn’t see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.Richard Feynman Standardized testing is a necessary evil. Wikipedia2 defines a necessary evil as "an evil that someone believes must be done or accepted because it is necessary to achieve a better outcome—especially because... Continue Reading →
After falling down the rabbit hole and entering the garden, Alice encounters The Mad Hatter, The Dormouse, and The March Hare having a tea party. The tea party is characterized by switching places on the table at any given time, making short, personal remarks, asking unanswerable riddles and reciting nonsensical poetry. The encounter with these three characters is... Continue Reading →
Do students at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT ever struggle with proof-based mathematics such as Linear Algebra or Abstract Algebra or Real Analysis or they always find these very easy? I graduated from Stanford in 1964 as a mathematics major. I can assure you that I had plenty of difficulty with proof-based mathematics. I... Continue Reading →
We all use math every day;to predict weather, to tell time, to handle money.Math is more than formulas or equations;it's logic, it's rationality,it's using your mind to solve the biggest mysteries we know. Numbers (stylized as NUMB3RS) is an American crime drama television series that ran on CBS from January 23, 2005, to March 12,... Continue Reading →
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” ~ Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle In "Convergence", Numb3rs S2E7, Meghan Reeves and Charlie Epps have the following conversation. MEGAN: Wouldn't that much data make it harder to find what you're looking for? CHARLIE: The opposite. More... Continue Reading →
"It is better to solve one problem five different ways, than to solve five problems one way." ~ George Polya Many years ago I had an instructor who used to read the "magic" tricks from The Mad Book Of Magic And Other Dirty Tricks1 during class to break the monotony. The Incomparable "Traveling Watch" Trick... Continue Reading →
Mathematical Mysteries 