Making Your Own Sense
Reflections on maths, learning, and the Maths Learning Centre.
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David Butler and the Prisoner of Alhazen
Once upon a time, I did a PhD in projective geometry. It was all about objects called quadrals (a word I made up) - ovals, ovoids, conics, quadrics and their cones - and the lines associated with them - tangents, secants, external lines, generator lines. During the first two years, I did talks about my PhD research, which I could not resist calling "David Butler and the Philosopher's Cone" and "David Butler and the Chamber of Secants".
Mansplaining
A few months ago, I learned a new word: "mansplaining". You may have heard it before, but I never had until this year.
The line at infinity
I foolishly said this on Twitter about a month ago:
A Day of Maths
Last Monday, I was invited into my daughter's Year 7 classroom to do a full day of maths with the students. It was the Best Day Ever. I had so much fun giving the students things to think about, and watching and helping the students think and talk about them.
Four alternatives to the four fours
The "Four Fours" is a very well-known little problem that encourages some creative thinking and use of the order of operations. The purpose of this post is to show you four fourfoursesque puzzles I've created which have encouraged some great learning.
Things not sides
When doing algebra and solving equations, there is this move we often make which is usually called "doing the same thing to both sides". Quite recently this phrase of "both sides" has begun to bother me.
Spotless dice
Upon Amie Albrecht and Cathy Wilton's request, I am writing a blog post about a problem we worked on at One Hundred Factorial recently. A few weeks ago we became interested in problems involving removing spots from dice.
The right order for the fundamental trig identity
If you google "fundamental trig identity" you will get many many images and handouts which all list the fundamental trig identity as:
[Read more about The right order for the fundamental trig identity]
Do you get tired of the same topics?
In the Drop-In Centre, the majority of students visit to ask for help learning in a very small number of courses, mostly the first-year ones with "mathematics" in the title. Of course, any student from anywhere in the uni can visit to ask about maths relating to any course, and we do see them from everywhere, but the courses called Maths 1X have between them a couple of thousand students per semester and that's a lot of people who might need help to learn how to learn.
Showing how to be wrong
After writing the previous blog post (Finding errors by asking how your answer is wrong) and rereading one I wrote three years ago (Who tells you if you're correct?), I got to thinking about how students are supposed to learn how to check if they are right.
