Category: Education

  • You never know when someone will do something cool with your open-source project

    So, a little bit of backstory: about 5 years ago, I became very interested in triangle centers for a while, because I thought they were going to solve my problems with the square-peg theorem (they didn’t). Triangle centers are various special points that you can define for a triangle in the plane: say, the center…

  • Why are we doing this in Math class again?

    I just read a very interesting answer on Quora about whether we have too much math and science education in the U.S. school system. You can read the whole thing at the link, but it made a pretty good discussion about why I’m shifting my calculus class to do some much larger, integrative labs (with…

  • Representation in the Math Major

    I was recently invited to a meeting on “Transforming Post-Secondary Education in Mathematics” in Austin. One of the sessions is about “Opening Pathways”, especially for “underrepresented groups” in the math majors. This got me thinking about the term “underrepresented groups”. Who is underrepresented? What is the desirable level of representation and how should we calculate it?…

  • Teacher Appreciation Week!

    Since I’ve been the beneficiary of a lot of life-changingly good teaching throughout my life, I thought I’d post a little honor roll of teachers that I really appreciate this week: Dr. Nancy Rosenberger, Conestoga High School. For teaching me American Literature, and much more importantly for teaching me how to write. Dr. Athanasios Moulakis,…

  • Unity! (And something amazing from the DoD)

    I’ve now spent a few days rebuilding my web game TaylorTurret in the public game engine Unity. As always, when you finally find the right tool for something, you spend a lot of time wondering why you didn’t do it this way in the first place. This thing is really amazing! It does all the lighting,…

  • Solving Mazes by Coloring

    Most people know that you can always solve a maze (eventually) by turning left. Here’s a more visual solution to the maze problem which I developed for a elementary school class at Waseca Montessori School in Athens, Georgia. Instead of thinking about the maze, think about the walls of the maze: if there’s a path…

  • Fold And Cut Puzzles

    Erik Demaine, Marty Demaine, and Anna Lubiw proved the following amazing thing a few years ago: You can fold a piece of paper so that ANY shape with straight edges can be cut out of the paper with a single cut. see Erik’s page on Fold-And-Cut problems to read more about the history of this fact. (Did…

  • Cotton Patch Quilters Talk

    In August of 2007 I was lucky enough to give a talk on mathematics and quilting to the Cotton Patch quilters here in Athens. The talk was a lot of fun, and taught me quite a bit about quilts! You can read the slides at the link above.

  • Mathematics and Visualization Summer Program 2004

    In the summer of 2004, I ran a summer program on Mathematics and Visualization which enrolled four art students and four science students for a series of joint projects in science and art. We started with the project of building our own image filters in MATLAB. Here’s an example of a filter created by Seth…

  • A Practical Introduction to Mathematical Visualization