Weekly Picks
December 8, 2011 § Leave a Comment
We try to read every blog post that goes through Mathblogging.org. For the Weekly Picks, we collect posts from last week that give you an impression of what the mathematical blogosphere has to offer.
Educators
21st Century Educator collected 10.000 tweets of #pencilchat gone viral.
Think Thank Thunk is grieving for grades after teaching without grading for an entire semester.
Exzuberant offered ideas for end-of-year maths classes.
f(t) function of time took lots of good ideas for learning about surfaces and volume, and turns it into a coherent story for the classroom.
Researchers
Peter Cameron had a masters student point him to some excellent lecture notes by Peter Sarnak on Appolonian circle packing.
Terry Tao started a lecture notes series on expander graphs while E. Kowalski mused about his notes on expanders and two different Caley graphs of the group of order 2.
If you haven’t followed the debate on TCS breakthrough in matrix multiplication, you can read up on it at Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP (and you might also check out a short comment at Yet Another Math Programmer).
Community
Punk Rock OR gave advice on how to choose your academic family.
MAA’s Launchings by David Bressoud analyzed the CBMS report on faculty development in college&university math departments in the US.
SymOmega debated grade scaling policies.
Exposition
Area 777 gets you from diverging triangle approximations of a smooth surface to building an actual lantern.
Enjoy!
