Math Movement

Mime visualizes an invisible world. Generally, we expect such silent performers to press against an invisible wall or be lifted by an imaginary balloon. While such ideas can be adapted to teach mathematical ideas, the silence of a mime can also welcome an audience to make connections of their own. The whimsy of a clown can warmly welcome […]

Mime, at least in the tradition of the great Marcel Marceau, is inherently artistic and precise in its physical articulation. Does such a limited overview of mime already set it apart from the logical field of mathematics? I don’t believe so. Mathematicians can be silenced by an elegant proof, which we may describe as beautiful. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Did you know that M&Ms can be integral to a Calculus lesson? Be forewarned that you may have a decision to make. Using only pictures, like in this blog entry, you can take more of a theoretical chocolate analysis of Calculus. Or, buy a big bag of M&Ms and dig in, for hands-on learning, of […]

An active area of my recent research has been applying ranking methods to social networks. A popular one that has publicly available network information is Twitter. For the non-tweeter, here is a Twitter tutorial in a few sentences. Twitter is a social networking service. Users tweet by sending a text-based post of up to 140 […]

What if love songs or poems used illustrations from math? Supplying examples to demonstrate how this might (albeit with exceedingly low probability) be done could be a whimsical assignment for a Calculus class that falls nicely into a Valentine’s theme. Here are some of my examples. I imagine students could come up with even better […]