Complete The Square

February 24, 2011 in Cool Tricks, Math 104, Rambles

Exam II. (Math 104.) Polynomials. Quadratics in particular. Bad news. The campus-wide median score slipped considerably and so did ours. A lot of damage was done on the page having problems of the forms (a.) Complete the Square… and (b.) Use the Quadratic Formula… (… to solve a given quadratic equation.). I’ve written a little [...]

…and then a hockey game broke out…

February 20, 2011 in Projective Spaces

my previous post was about an earlier version of this drawing. i’ve added most of the rest of the lines. if the fine print emerges in your version, you’ll see *three vertical *three horizontal and *three upward-sloping lines, plus the “line at infinity”. i’ve also added (what i’ll now call) “polar lines” for a few [...]

someday i’ll learn how to scan a document

February 15, 2011 in Projective Spaces

until that day, i’ve set up a process involving “photo booth” (on the mac) and “flickr” (on the web). optionally, i can involve the mac’s “iPhoto”. not sure yet if that’s ever going to be useful… but it organized the “photo booth” stuff in maybe a better way than Photo Booth itself. i’m *writing* this [...]

or, sometimes, randomly staying put

February 11, 2011 in Carnival

carnival of mathematics #74.

you could look it up

February 10, 2011 in Graphics, Gush, Textbooks

i didn’t swipe this when i drew this … but of course the *idea* has been around for centuries. i did *learn* a lot from _the_fundamental_concepts_of_geometry_ (bruce e. meserve). it’s a cheap dover reprint and a masterpiece of clear exposition. *everybody* oughta have one of these… just like a bible, a shakespeare, and a dictionary. [...]

i pubbed my ish

February 7, 2011 in Graphics, MathEdZine, Projective Spaces

here’s MEdZ #1 in both editions: last year’s “mini” and this years “digest” sizes. the 2011 edition features, along with “the hip-pocket vocab” (a glossary for math-for-humanities), some remixed drawings from some “micro” zines (also from last year), along with some (new, brief) handwritten commentary. the seven-sections pictures look way better cut together (so here [...]

the skin of our teeth

February 4, 2011 in Math 104, Rambles

tonight we looked at a *great deal* of material-from-the-syllabus. too much by almost any standard, i think. and obviously, missing a day… half a week, really… doesn’t help. and yet. it’s built into the course. never mind snow days: if you’re getting most of your ideas about What Algebra Is *or* How To Do It, [...]

classes appear to have been cancelled

February 1, 2011 in Math 104, MathEdZine

but i’m here of course. in a short while i’ll go see who *else* made it through the ice and snow; naturally i’ll try to give ‘em something extra. but “time listening to owen rambling about math” doesn’t seem to be *widely* understood as “something extra”. so we’ll see. there’s a new edition of MEdZ [...]

start one dimension up and form a quotient space. or start with ordinary n-space and add “infinite” points.

February 1, 2011 in Graphics, Projective Spaces

so here’s my latest version of , the two-dimensional projective space constructed on the field of three elements. and the story. there are thirteen “windows”. through each window, one sees a “line”. each line is associated with four windows; these in their turn, upon “looking through”, show the four lines through the original window. i [...]