134 students from Mt. Greylock and BArT High Schools attended this morning’s Williams College MathBlast, dedicated to the memory of founder Professor Olga R. Beaver, who passed on four days earlier. Sponsored by the Williams Center at Mount Greylock and the Williams College Math Department, MathBlast is a morning for 10th… Continue reading »
The theory is that traditional (incandescent) light bulbs waste lots of energy by producing more heat than light. Let’s look at the bigger picture. I’m a big fan of saving energy: I go shopping with my car just once a month, I keep the thermostat at 50 degrees, I turn… Continue reading »
In statistics, we draw conclusions from data. But to get data, we need to be able to measure the variable(s) that we are interested in. Measuring can be very crude (say, a trait is absent or present) or rather sophisticated (the expression levels of large numbers of genes). In the… Continue reading »
At 6 am Friday morning President Falk canceled all classes and summoned us home to our Purple mountains. Check out the video. Continue reading »
What do you think? How do you think? And can you think even better? I’ve spent nearly ten years focusing on these and related questions. The result is a recently-published book, co-authored with Michael Starbird from The University of Texas at Austin, entitled The 5… Continue reading »
The teaching of my first tutorial at Williams occurred in Spring 2012, on phylogenetics, the study of evolutionary trees. As with most tutorials, I had ten students in my class, grouped in pairs, where their strengths included pure mathematics, biology, art, and computer science. My tutorial was… Continue reading »
Williams Professor Susan Loepp received the national Haimo teaching award of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) from President Paul Zorn at the joint annual mathematics meetings in Boston on Thursday, January 5. The press releases (Williams and MAA) praise Loepp’s high standards (including… Continue reading »
In what way is mathematics dangerous? This past year, the Williams College Gaudino program has been looking at the idea of danger. Hence my question, in what way is mathematics dangerous? Maybe there is emotional danger, as the media mocks the typical math professor as nerdy and… Continue reading »
I’d encourage mathematicians to look at Alain Badiou’s Being and Event and Logic of Worlds. Both are full of a lot of ideas. What mathematician cannot be thrilled by the statement in the introduction to Being and Event that “mathematics is ontology.” More directly, reading Badiou made… Continue reading »
President Falk rang the bells, canceling classes, and we headed once more up into the mountains for another Mountain Day: … Continue reading »