Last Post

February 26, 2009 in Blogs, Math 148, Meta

I’ve started up new blogs at Math 148: Precalculus and Madness and Poverty.Nothing would please me more than for some comments to bust out right about here. Nothing that could happen online, anyway. Thanks for your kind attention.

I Quit: A Clarification

February 24, 2009 in Meta

Maybe I learned a lot doing this; right now it feels like the main thing I’ve learned is that I don’t want to do it. Naturally it’s somewhat embarrassing that it took me about seven quarters to find this out. What can I say. I’ve always been a slow learner. I’m not even acquainted with [...]

Now What

February 24, 2009 in Meta

Yesterday the post below passed the WordPress TeX compiler; today it doesn’t. I didn’t change anything. I worked for hours on the god damn thing and I want it to be over with. Don’t be a blogger; it’s fucking impossible.Update: it’s worse than I think. The formulas in question look okay onmy computer but show [...]

One Must Imagine Vlorbik Happy

February 23, 2009 in Math 148

Exam II is in a couple days. Zeros of polynomials, graphs of rational functions, compositions and inverses.(I have just named three topics, not four; here [shrink the window to the size of a column] are some remarks on “the serial comma” I made back in th’ XXth c.)Of course my classes are ill-prepared for this [...]

And Into The Black

February 20, 2009 in Math 148

If somebody comes up to you out of the blue and says, okay, a Rational Function has the form , where f and g are polynomial functions, why then, there are any number of things about this definition that you might want to know next. Hey Vlorbik (you might say for example), how about giving [...]

Bricks Without Straw

February 18, 2009 in Math 148

OK. Look. Last week’s rant was exhausting and I don’t want to make a career out of railing against this doggone book. But come on. How the bejabbers am I supposed to talk about inverse functions without a notation for the furshlugginer Identity Function? I mean, seriously.Consider the set of Real-valued functions of a Real [...]

DM Seeks ODE For ???

February 17, 2009 in Math 148

In the AM classes, I began with bigpicture stuff (for reasons obscure to me): function composition considered as an operation. Specifically, as on operation on functions.The point here is to stress the analogy with the more familiar situation where operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are applied to (pairs of) numbers to produce “new” [...]

Hi, Mom!

February 10, 2009 in Links

The NYT has begun running a Sudoku variant (called KenKen). If they’ve got one in the Sunday edition, I’ll try it out. I’ve done a Sudoku… they’re sort of like Word Search puzzles… more of a chore than a game…Barry G. on Forbes on the uselessness of math, in KTM. Also, what the heck, SteveH [...]

Section 5.5: A Manifesto

February 9, 2009 in Math 148, Rants, Textbooks

The post is even more of a mess than usual. That “does not parse” parsed yesterday. I had to cut a piece out (you’ll find the hole) because it was acting downright weird for no apparent reason. Welcome to WordPress.The text is even more of a mess than usual. Evidently certain forces have led its [...]

Kiss Joy As It Flies

February 5, 2009 in Carnival, Links

Here’s “On2: transfinite number hacking”. Lieven le Bruyn’s NEVERENDINGBOOKS isn’t really a blog at all… and in some earlier version, I’d failed to “get it”. My bad. This is some amazing stuff: advanced mathematics in very readable style. “Mumford’s Treasure Map” is a mini-masterpiece.The fact that I never even thought to go look at last [...]