- For you to be successful, your attitude is as important as your ability.
- What you do shows what you are.
- Wherever you are, be all there. Jim Elliot
- This is not going to be a "practical math" course: you will not
learn how to balance a checkbook.
This is a course incorporating material for a broad range of liberal arts disciplines. Some of them will be interesting to you, some of them may not. But this is not another algebra course. You may never have seen any mathematics quite like the things that we're going to study in this course!
- Ordinarily, class is organized around discussions of material; however that's not really possible this semester. So I'm hoping that you'll use the discussion boards on Canvas. I find that students are best at explaining ideas to other students. So what I shoot for is some students to get the idea in class, and then to "infect" the rest of the students.
You'll also want to watch the video from Sesame Street about the Furry Arms Hotel.
- Keep an open mind.
- Just do it. Jump in. Make mistakes and fail, but never give up.
- Often when we've done it once, we do it again. Follow up one good deed with another!
- Understand simple things deeply.
- Break a difficult problem into easier ones.
- Look for patterns and similarities.
- Explore the consequences of new ideas. Generalize.
- Examine issues from several points of view.
Don't be a turkey -- be a dog! (this one may require a little explanation....)
- Discussions,
- Exams (Lockdown browser): the dates are
(I've got it scheduled over two days, to give you a chance to find a good time convenient for you.)Date Day MAT115 activity 2/18-2/19/2021 Exam 1 Your exam will be taken via Lockdown Browser 3/25-3/26/2021 Exam 2 Your exam will be taken via Lockdown Browser - Submitting assignments,
- and maybe other stuff.
Mathematicians love patterns. You may not know that, but it's true. So when a mathematician sees something that seems to have patterns to it, she may just have to drop everything and try to figure out what's going on.... I'm going to ask you to do the same, right now.
Imagine that you're an archeaologist, studying the ancient Chinese (circa 1300 AD), and you come across the following image stamped on frail bamboo paper:
You're certain that this object must have some very interesting mathematical content, but aren't sure what. But you'd certainly like to know!
I'd like you to explore this object, perhaps using this printable handout (in past courses, I'd have given you a copy...:().
We'll try to figure out what's going on here.
- Look for patterns;
- Make conjectures (theories, hypotheses);
- Test conjectures! Are you on the right track?
- Read "From Fish to Infinity" in your text (and make sure you watch the video from Sesame Street!)
- Examine this interesting Chinese artifict: what's going on?
- On our Canvas site:
- Introduce yourself
- Participate in the discussion concerning this artifact on Canvas.