main: Page 1 of 2
-
Fun with Mobius strips
So here at Westminster we do a “Spooky Science” community activity thing each year around Halloween. I've run the following activity about spoooooooky non-orientable surfaces a couple of times, and people of many ages (from 6 to 66!) have fun with it. Also fun in classrooms!
-
An old thread from Twitter about "cheating"
Friend of mine just asked me for an old twitter thread I wrote one time about how I turned a “cheating” moment into a learning moment. I had to dig it out of the json files in my twitter archive (relatedly, if anybody knows a good way to pull a thread out of the twitter archive, rather than just individual tweets or replies, hit me the fuck up), so I thought I would post it here on The Blog for accessibility slash future reference.
-
The Peter Q. Keep Memorial Award for Excellence in Lesson Planning
It is probably important to note two things at the outset: (a) I do not have direct knowledge as to whether Peter Keep's middle initial is indeed Q (but it's the funniest letter), and (b) Peter Keep is not dead.
-
The things in these proofs are really weird
This post is part of a three-post set (1 2 3) about groups of order $pqr$, where $p<q<r$ are prime.
In this post, I'm reflecting on Ben Blum-Smith's classic the things in proofs are weird. I encountered such a proof while thinking about $pqr$-groups, and an even weirder one earlier in the semester. -
Up and down the subgroup lattice
This post is part of a three-post set (1 2 3) about groups of order $pqr$, where $p<q<r$ are prime. While thinking about such $pqr$-groups, I've collected a bunch of theorems and lemmas into a little mental toolbox. An interesting commonality between a lot of these tools is that they tell us about the relationship between various different animals in the subgroup lattice; an interesting difference is that some of them go “upwards,” some of them go “downwards,”1 and some of them even go “sideways.”
-
If you have an opinion about “downward” vs. “downwards,” that is very nice but I don't actually care. <3 ↩
-
-
$pqr$-groups
This post is part of a three-post set (1 2 3) about groups of order $pqr$, where $p<q<r$ are prime. While designing final exam questions for my group theory class, I was playing around with groups of order 42, for no particular reason, and then a friend noticed something interesting that I wanted to try to prove more generally. Here's a complete writeup of this proof. Is it the most beautiful and elegant proof? Certainly not; you can directly quote some results about groups of square-free order being supersolvable, but I think this approach is pedagogically useful.
-
LLM policy
At the end of the term here, I'm making a few edits / updates to my syllabus policy on the use of LLMs etc., and I decided to post it in some place that's easily shareable.
-
Weird Pep Talk
(I needed to give this weird pep talk to a class of people learning to write proofs. I was originally going to write it as a Canvas announcement but then decided it'd be nice to be able to reference it elsewhere more easily.)
-
A card activity in Calculus 2
Yesterday I was scheduled to teach my Calculus 2 class about the Second FTC at 10am, so of course I had a great idea for an activity at approximately 9:48am.
-
Asides in the margin in PreTeXt pdfs
Asides are a neat feature in PreTeXt books – in the web version, they show up as cute li'l notes floating semi-transparently in the margin. However, in LaTeX builds, asides get dumped into plain text with no particular styling. This is sad so I decided to fix it.