After a weekend with Christian where I didn't get much work done, I tried to catch up yesterday, but didn't quite get enough done. As a result, today I was scrambling to get everything together in time. Lectures went fine, but I felt at least like in precalculus I dragged out a topic (increasing/decreasing functions) that could have been a bit more ( Read more... )

James Stewart, the author of the most popular calculus book in the world, died last month.

At the airport in Graz now ( Read more... )

I don't know whether to groan or show a little respect to Drake for including a little vulgar math joke in his rap segment for Rihanna's "What's My Name?". I really didn't expect to suddenly hear

"The square root of 69 is 8 something."

I forgot to post something after the election last week: Congratulations to Tammy Baldwin, the Senator-elect from Wisconsin. Not only is she the first openly gay person to be elected to the U.S. Senate, she is the first math major from Smith College to be elected to the U.S. Senate.

In case you missed it, there was a cute article about the Traveling Salesman Problem and G.O.P. campaign tours of Iowa before the cauci.

In other mathematical news, I really liked this pop math article about the volume of spheres in $n$-dimensional space that appeared in American Scientist. Christian and I were both amazed to find that magazine ( Read more... )

I drove into campus today because I had volunteered to represent the math department at Smith's Women of Distinction event for high school students interested in science. Danielle helped out, as did two postbacs. We bought a whole bunch of chocolate and then showed the prospies how to play Chomp, a two-player game where people alternate eating ( Read more... )

I don't know how many of you saw this, but there's a new math museum that's scheduled to open in Manhattan next year. It sounds pretty exciting.

This was the poster art for a conference on "Harmonie et Chaos" that was held here in Lyon. I think it's pretty damn cool.

We drove up to New Haven early this morning so that Christian could finally see the apartment and be added to the lease. I'm happy to report that he did in fact like the apartment. Our only worry is that it's so much bigger than anything we've had that we won't have enough stuff to fill it with ( Read more... )