Math Movement

Tomorrow, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 opens around the country. It is also the day I return to Charlotte from the Yale National Initiative’s Intensive Session. In honor of a successful week at Yale and what will undoubtedly be a successful opening day for a movie, this blog entry is inspired […]

I compose this blog while stretched out on a dorm bed at Yale University. I’m midway through my time at the Yale National Initiative’s Intensive Session as a College Faculty Member given my involvement with the Charlotte Teachers Institute. My time has been inspiring and thought-provoking. Today, I visited the seminar Great Ideas of Primary […]

A clever use of mathematics can mystify audiences. A variety of resources divulge such secrets for a budding mathematically-inclined magician. Colm Mulcahy’s (Spelman College) column Card Colm on MAA Online reveals the mathematics behind a variety of tricks that involve such topics as Fibonacci numbers and results of Paul Erdös. Mathemagician Art Benjamin (Harvey Mudd […]

My online Loci article Mountains of Fractals allows readers to create fractal coastlines, fractal islands, and fractal mountains. One such mountain is pictured below. The 3D images are stunning and could even seem to overshadow the 2D counterparts. However, 2D fractal landscapes have their own important place in computer graphics. Suppose in a movie a […]

Service-learning offers unique educational opportunities for students to apply their learning to issues of community interest. This post will discuss how I have integrated service-learning into a final project used in a discrete math modeling course. The course teaches such topics as Monte Carlo simulation, queuing theory, Markov Chains, and optimization. The capstone group project […]

Increasingly, I’ve been asked about my work with Amy Langville in sports ranking. In particular, students and faculty have been interested in researching or teaching ranking methods based in linear algebra. To help enable others tailor their work, I inevitably discuss how to find sports data. One of the easiest ways to explore existing methods […]

Algebra covers solution techniques to solve linear systems like 2x – 3y = 5 and 3x + 2y = 1. Removing y, for instance, solving for x and then substituting the value for x to find y yields the solution x = 1 and y = -1. Another way to represent the equations is as […]

As the fall semester of 2010 ended, I assigned a rather comical assignment in my Calculus 2 classes. Students were told that the assignment was designed to aid in their preparations for the final exam. They could work with up to 2 other students. The assignment involved picking any content of the semester and create […]

Let’s play with some food and create mosaics with pieces of candy. We need to place the treats so the resulting image will visually approximate an underlying picture. In this post, you’ll have the opportunity to create mosaics with a variety of candies. For now, we’ll use M&Ms. Fortunately, they melt in your mouth and […]

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization. Given a list of cities and the distance between each pair of cities, the TSP requires finding a shortest possible tour that visits each city exactly once and returns to the starting point. The TSP is one of the most intensely studied problems […]