Mathematics and other passions
SEPTEMBER 21, 2023.* The menu bar on this site just acquired a new entry: Devlin’s Angle. It provides a complete archive of all the posts I published for the Mathematical Association of America’s online information service MAA Online since January 1996, when that site launched. In 2018, MAA Online morphed into a multi-author blog (on a new commercial … Continue reading New Section added to this…
MARCH 17, 2020. How dangerous is the novel coronavirus, and how does that risk compare with other risks we face in our lives? A bit of number sense and a few simple calculations allow us to visualize, and hence compare, the risks. Imagine God has a book with the names of all people living in … Continue reading COVID-19 and God’s List: assessing personal risk from the novel coronavirus
JULY 8, 2019. It’s been over three years since I last posted to this blog. Not that I stopped writing. In addition to my long running monthly Devlin’s Angle for the Mathematical Association of America, early this year I launched the Stanford Mathematics Outreach Project (sumop.org), which has its own blog. The former is aimed, … Continue reading The math behind Apollo 11
[This is a greatly expanded version of the essay published in Edge as my response to the Annual Edge Question for 2016.] JANUARY 18, 2016. If you google the term “education science”, the search engine will return almost 2 billion hits. Yet even those of us who might be regarded as “in the field” will … Continue reading The beginnings of Education Science?
NOVEMBER 24, 2014. What is a mathematical proof? Way back when I was a college freshman, I could give you a precise answer: A proof of a statement S is a finite sequence of assertions S(1), S(2), … S(n) such that S(n) = S and each S(i) is either an axiom or else follows from … Continue reading What is a proof, really?