The New Math Seminar
Welcome to the Math Seminar page! The seminar meets every Thursday around 5 p.m. in Wilson 416. There will be a short (15 min) talk, yummy snacks and good conversation about mathematics and teaching. Students, adjuncts and faculty are welcome to help us build a math community!   For the (very) old Basic Notions Seminar (2007) click here .

Schedule Spring 2011
1/27/11:Christine von Renesse Let's see in how many ways we can cut a bagel! I learned about this trick from George Hart at the joint meetings 2011.
2/22/11:Nathan Clark Nate will show us how to make "Division by zero" possible. :)
3/3/11: Organization of Display Cabinets Please come and help!
4/7/11:Ted Welsh Numbersense: Using manipulatives to work with negative numbers.
4/14/11: Practice talks for HRUMC Marena and Chris are talking about their research in crime statistics, and Christian and Julian Fleron are showing us different projections of the cube.
4/21/11: Foundations Meeting We are going to discuss the content of our foundations courses for future eementary school teachers.

 

 

Schedule Fall 2010
9/7/10: Phil Hotchkiss: Knights, Knaves and Goedel This summer, Julian and I were looking for a way to include Godel's Incompleteness Theorems in our Reasoning book. I stumbled across a book called "Forever Undecided" by the logician Raymond Smullyan that uses his Knights and Knaves model (an island where every native is either a Knight, who always tells the truth, or a Knave, who always lies) to explore Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. In this talk we will look at the draft of our inclusion of this model and the Incompleteness Theorems in the Reasoning Book.
9/14/10: Julian Fleron: Helping Students Discover Properties of and Rules for Exponents In keeping with our focus on inquiry and constructivism, we explore ways that students can discover/re-invent meaning for exponents, properties of exponents, and rules for exponents. I'll begin with brief history before steering the discussion to practical ways to help students (MLA, precalc, calc, MBusiness, B123, future teachers) develop both real and working understandings of exponents. In addition to the focus on practical pedagogy, we will keep sight of the fundamental isomorphism \phi(n)=a^n which translates the group of integers (or rationals) under addition to the group of powers (or fractional powers) under multiplication; i.e. that working with exponentials is just a different way of our natural counting.
9/21/10: ALEKS A number of us have used ALEKS in our courses. We'd like to have a conversation and hear about your experiences with ALEKS; e.g. what was helpful for us, for the way the class ran, for our students,...
9/28/10: Foundations Sequence We will discuss the effectiveness of our foundation courses and the change in order and content coming Fall 2011.
10/5/10: Karin Vorwerk: Honors in Mathmatics This seminar will be used to discuss how to create an "honor in mathematics". Which additional classes or projects should be required?
10/12/10: Foundations Sequence We will continue our discussion the effectiveness of our foundation courses and the change in order and content coming Fall 2011.
10/19/10: Volker Ecke and Christine von Renesse: Computational Procedures This seminar will be devoted to short activities that we can use in our foundations classes to "drill" computation. What are computational skill you would like your students to know (e.g. decimals,...)? What are activities you could use to practice those? Please come and share your ideas! Volker and I will present some activities/formats from Investigations (Elem school program).
11/2/10: Christine von Renesse: Math and Dancing This seminar I would like to try a new activity about dancing/moving and geometry. We will create polyhedra using string and lots of people.
11/9/10: Julian Fleron: Aletrnating Harmonic Series This seminar I will show a new beautiful proof that the Alternating Harmonic Series sums to ln(2). I've been working with the Alternating Harmonic Series and have some things I can share. I also was part of some cool activities on Anna's classes recently about visual ways of seeing series converged. So bring some crayons and we'll color while we contemplate ways of representing the infinite. Also, please feel free to invite your students. It will be good for all students from Calculus I up. It might be fine for MLA students too if they have thought some about the infinite before.
11/16/10: Marcus Jaiclin: Writing in Mathematics I am beginning work for the Writing Liaison Committee on how we use writing in our classes, so I would like to see how people are using writing in their classes, how you feel about that, what you'd like to do in the future, and give you a couple of suggestions for additional resources on developing writing assignments. If you have any writing assignments you've used that you can run off and bring, that would be great.
11/23/10: Karin Vorwerk: Mathematics in Germany Karin will tell us about her experince during her sabbatical. She gained new experiences in highschool and university mathematics in Germany.
12/7/10: Buzz Hoagland: R From S to R in 30 minutes. A very brief introduction to data exploration and analysis using R.

 

 

Schedule Spring 2010
1/26/10 and 2/2/10: Restructuring our Math Major? How do we get more math majors to take our 300 level classes? Do we want to start an honors program in math?
2/10/10: Manipulatives Help us organize our many math manipulatives! Let's make a list of what we have. Do we need to order more?
2/16/10: Department Website Marcus and Volker are in charge of our department website. Do we want to make any changes?
2/23/10 and 3/2/10: CONNECT Math Conference We are discussing opportunities and THREATS concerning the "CONNECT Math Conference" (Feb 26th). Phil Hotchkiss and Volker Eckes are going to the conference and will report back to us.
3/9/10: Christine von Renesse: FUNCO We will play the calculus game FUNCO, developed by Mairead Greene, Rockhurst University.
3/23/10: Ted Welsh: LEGO Inclusive Counting and Pythagoras gang up on Lego to Really Twist Things.
3/30/10: Alicia Chandler: Rock, Paper, Scissors and the Pythagorean Theorem As an observer of a Geometry class that is directed towards early/elementary education teachers I will discuss an activity done in our classroom. This activity helped the class recognize a way to prove the Pythagorean Theorem by discovering diagonal distances and cutting out paper. I will also discuss special Pythagorean triples that were found and how we used a rock pattern to enhance visual learning and acknowledge these triples. Lastly I will identify an intuitive way to find an infinite number of these Pythagorean triples.

 

 

Schedule Fall 2009
9/15/09: Karin Vorwerk: Update on Effectiveness of ALEKS Does success on ALEKS correlate with a good grade in our classes? Does it correlate with high school GPA or the Accuplacer result?
9/22/09: Julian Fleron:Permutations and Dance How can we use dance to improve our understanding of permutations? Can we use this for an abstract algebra class?
10/6/09: Christine von Renesse: Symmetries and Dance How can we use dance to improve our understanding of symmetries?
10/20/09: Volker Ecke: GeomLab GeomLab is a software using pictures and images to explore recursive creative processes. For an Escher-like example picture see http://web2.comlab.ox.ac.uk/geomlab/
10/27/09: Ted Welsh: Solids of Revolution Need a discretized double or triple integral? Here it is! There is Lego involved...
11/10/09: Julian Fleron: Modular Patterns in Art Spirograph, Star Polygons and the Chinese Remainder Theorem

Schedule Spring 2009
1/27: Julian Fleron: Mathematical Views of the Inauguration Come see high-resolution satellite images of last week's Presidential Inauguration in Washington DC. We will see how and why these images are: Beautiful in their own right. - An important part of the historic record. - Can be important into Google Earth to provide interactive, panoramic, 3D views of the Inauguration - almost as if you were there. - Critical to ongoing debates about crowd size. - Involve controversies about the accuracy of information reported in the press.
2/10: Ted Welsh and Anna Rokicki: The Calculus Wish List How many times has this happened to you: You're rolling along in an upper-level class, closing in on the Fundamental Theorem of the Entire Field. You come to a technical step in the proof, handled by an elementary calculus computation. And then, the unthinkable happens: an entire room full of math majors stops thinking. Calculus recall: zero. Disaster.   Anna and I are working to remedy the situation. We want to build a document of specific calculus problems used in upper-level classes that our majors will fill in as they work through the calculus sequence. What should be in this document? Which calculations do you use in your upper level classes? We'll start this conversation Tuesday at 5pm in Wilson 405. I hope to see you there!
2/17: Foundations Meeting This week the regular Math Seminar is cancelled. There will be a meeting about the foundations courses at Julian Fleron's house at 5:15 instead.
2/24: Christine von Renesse: Mathematica at Westfield I will show how to use mathematica on our department laptops in the classrooms. Then we can play with mathematica to get used to its syntax...

 

 

 

Schedule Fall 2008
9/9: Christine von Renesse: The colored Hypercube. Yet another idea to "see" the 4 dimensional hypercube using an idea from Summer Math at Mount Holyoke College.
9/16: Christine von Renesse: Piloting Aleks in Math 150 www.aleks.com: "ALEKS is a web-based, artificially intelligent assessment and learning system. ALEKS uses adaptive questioning to quickly and accurately determine exactly what a student knows and doesn't know in a course. ALEKS then instructs the student on the topics she is most ready to learn. As a student works through a course, ALEKS periodically reassesses the student to ensure that topics learned are also retained. ALEKS courses are very complete in their topic coverage and ALEKS avoids multiple choice questions. A student who shows a high level of mastery of an ALEKS course will be successful in the actual course she is taking."   I will show how Aleks works and how I use it in Math 150. Maybe this will replace the Accuplacer one day?
9/23: Phillip Hotchkiss At first Phil will talk about WeBWorK, a free alternative to Aleks.
9/30: Julian Fleron What is Google Sketchup and how can we bring it into our classrooms?
10/7: Phillip Hotchkiss Phil will show how to use Drupal, an open source content management platform (with latex), in the mathematics classroom. www.drupal.org
10/14: Gary Merlo Gary will show how to use elluminate, an online environment that can be used to teach courses or hold online office hours. www.elluminate.com
10/21: Marcus Jaiclin The universe is non-Euclidean! Einstein showed in the General Theory of Relativity that the universe is non-Euclidean. We will run through a wonderful little proof, using monsters with fangs, that this is the case. The presentation should be accessible to all. Open to students and faculty.
10/28: Phil Hotchkiss and Marcus Jaiclin "Is Multiplication Repeated Addition?" In a recent online article entitled "It Ain't No Repeated Addition" (http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_06_08.html), Keith Devlin claimed that multiplication is not repeated addition and should not be taught as such to elementary students. Several members of our Department believe that repeated addition is an appropriate representation for multiplication and during this presentation we will explain why we believe this representation can be extended beyond multiplication of integers.
11/4: No seminar: GO VOTE :)
11/18: The Department "Fun with Manipulatives" We ordered new fantasic manipulatives for our classrooms, so come help us to explore and sort them! Everybody welcome :)
11/25: Christine von Renesse and Phil Hotchkiss "Assessment Tools and Learning Communities" Phil and I will share about our experience at the learning community conference in NYC. We will talk about assessment tools and learning comunities in general. Everybody welcome :)
12/02: Volker Ecke and Julian Fleron "George Hart's Talk" Volker and Julian will share about the great talk that George Hart gave a few weeks ago. Lots of beautiful geometry... Everybody welcome :)

Schedule Spring 2008
1/28: Christine von Renesse: The Game(s) Nim and Northscott's Game.
2/4: Julian Fleron: Prime Patterns and Class Numbers -- very hands on :)
2/11: Phil Hotchkiss: Tangles
2/25: Julian Fleron: What is a pattern?
3/17: Jose Lopez: ideas and insights about teaching minorities in Springfield
3/24: About grants and the IDIS...
3/31: Volker Ecke: Origami
4/7: Ted Welsh: Lego in the classroom
4/14: Prep-Talk for Hudson River Conference. Peter Waite: 3 dimensional Dedecaphony