Math Movement

In the classic children’s book, Millions of Cats written by Wanda Gág in 1928, a lonely, elderly couple enter a delightful tale about caring and self-esteem that also lends itself to a discussion of number sense. Toward the beginning of the story, the woman tells her husband that she thinks a cat would make them […]

Are you ready for some Monday Night Calculus? With the NFL season having started only a few days ago, it is time to perform some gridiron mathematics! Our calculations will focus on the logo for the Pittsburgh Steelers seen below. The outer edge of the emblem is a circle, which has the well-known ratio of […]

This semester, I’m teaching Calculus II. Yesterday, students submitted homework on finding volumes of solids of revolution. As a quick primer on these shapes, a solid of revolution is generated by rotating a planar region about an axis. For instance, rotating the right triangle below about the vertical axis generates the cone to the right. […]

Classifying handwritten digits is an issue, for instance, for the postal service. Automating the process of reading zip codes, for instance, can increase efficiency of mail sorting. To explore this idea, we will use the MNIST database of handwritten digits, which contains a training set of 60,000 digits and a test set of 10,000 numbers. […]

Interested in math and baseball? golf? football? soccer? basketball? Check out the newly released Mathematics and Sports book edited by Joe Gallian! My work on math and soccer, which includes a contributed article in that book, led me to help with the ESPN show, Sports Science, during the 2010 World Cup. This post is about […]

While I have yet to see the movie, I’ve been the recipient of considerable buzz about the movie Inception. Given this is one of the hot summer movies and simply how amazingly hot it has been this summer, it seems fitting to compose a post on the heat equation! The heat equation is a partial […]

Today, a new header image (the old was simply the default image) appeared on this blog. It seems appropriate to explain the images as the collage is meant to represent the various ways I move mathematically. Let’s start at the left and move our way to the right. Almost hidden in the lower left and […]

In the last post Doodling with Euler, we explored the Euler Characteristic with a sweeping doodle! Now, let’s apply it to some other images! First, consider this image of the Davidson College Wildcat logo. The image is constructed first as a stippling of the standard logo. Then, an algorithm is run that forms a Traveling […]

Let’s learn some math by doodling.  Let’s specifically learn the Euler Characteristic, which given it is attributed to Euler should lead to big expectations as to its power!  Why?  Let’s review a bit of mathematical history. Leonard Euler Euler was a famous mathematician who lived during the 1700’s.  He wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages […]

Given the last blog entry detailed my input on the Sports Science piece on home runs, it seems only appropriate to give the details of how my connections with Sports Science started.  The week before the World Cup began, I was in NYC with my family. The trip combined work and fun activities in the […]