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Comments

1 month ago

stopman said :

Regarding your answer:

Thanks for the reply!

December 25th, 2008

Santa said :

Merry Christmas!

Questions

• 1 week ago

  Where should I submit a short story if I actually want to see it published?

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• 2 months ago

  Is RAM I buy off ebay reliable?

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• August 4th, 2009

  Can anyone help me with a technical mathematical divisibility issue?

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• July 10th, 2009

  Could a faulty mac battery cause my macbook to crash even when it's plugged in?

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• June 7th, 2009

  Can you solve this (fun) math problem?

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Answers

• 2 weeks ago

  How do you create an equation or mathematical model from a coordinate table?

  What model are you using? Line? Parabola? Exponential? I would graph the data to see what type of curve looks like it might be best. I’m guessing exponential. If that’s the case, try graphing the data with the x values vs the logs of the y values, and see if you can fit a straight line to it. How exact does this need to be?
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• 2 weeks ago

  Where to find modern plays on the internet I can print and read?

  All of Charles Mee’s plays are available online for free. Some are really excellent.
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• 3 weeks ago

  What could be done to make math seem less uncool?

  @ratboy while your suggestions are “cool” in the rock band sense, they’re a very male-centric vision of cool (i.e. you get loose girls if you can do math). Aside from the fact that it’s blatantly false, I think this type of suggestion, even jokingly, reinforces the already sizable barriers for women in mathematics. The graduate student body in mathematics is something like 15% women in this country. I went to a math conference in Italy once, and it was more like 50%. So, in future jokes, make sure you mention how women who know calculus get followed home by vacuous, blue-eyed, male models.
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• 3 weeks ago

  Can anyone recommend an excellent dentist in Seattle?

  I’ve got someone good now. Thanks :)
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• 3 weeks ago

  What could be done to make math seem less uncool?

  Here are a few suggestions: 1. Take student questions seriously. In my experience, students aren’t born disliking math, and probably everyone is naturally interested in the subject. But once they’re taught that it has no relevance to their lives, and that there are no questions to answer, just insipid “problems” to solve, they learn to hate it. In my experience, the questions students ask are often the most interesting (and historically relevant) anyway. “Is infinity plus one the same as infinity” is actually a deep and mathematically useful question to ask. What does it mean for infinite sets to be “equal” in size? These questions take you interesting places, and if you’re a clever teacher, it’s not hard to take student questions seriously and still cover the curriculum you need to cover. 2. Mention great results and unsolved problems. So many people think that there’s nothing left to do in math. In reality, we know so little it’s shocking. We have a quadratic formula for degree 2 polynomials. We have a cubic formula for degree 3, and a quartic formula for degree 4. Quintic formula? Don’t have one. Ditto for every degree above 5. Is it even possible to find it? No. How do we know? How is it possible to prove anything is impossible without testing all the (infinite) cases? 3. Teach math along with it’s history. Isn’t math more interesting if we learn that the field of probability started with two mathematicians gambling? Or that the person who proved that there can be no quintic (or higher) formula died in a duel, after having written a letter the night before that solved the historic problem and gave birth to three new fields of mathematics? These are all illustrations of the point which others have already mentioned: if students are invited to have a personal, relevant engagement with a living subject, they’ll find it interesting; if they’re forced to memorize a bunch of rules for no reason that have no usefulness anyway, they’ll find it boring and stupid. (For more, check out this fluther question about the excellent essay A Mathematician’s Lament.)
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