I recently got a question from a question from a user about how to line up text objects. The question was both about lining up objects on a page, and about lining them up from one page to the next, so that when you switch pages things are in the same place on every page.
As … Continue Reading ››
Today's guest post is from Marta Venturini, a PhD student in Mathematics Education at Simon Fraser University under a "Cotutelle Agreement" with the University of Bologna, where she's a PhD student in Mathematics. While looking for some tasks that would be suitable for Sketchpad, I found the “dog leash” problem in a March 2007 Continue Reading ››
At the 2013 Baltimore Regional NCTM Meeting, I gave a presentation on Picturing Functions and Functions of Pictures. In the description of my presentation I’d promised to show how to use Sketchpad to create special effects, so when it came time to prepare, I figured I needed to deliver on my promise. So I wrote a … Continue Reading ››
[Today's post is from Steven Fuchs, with whom I recently corresponded and whose enthusiasm was sufficiently infectious that I pressed him to share it here. --Scott]
One day late last spring, while teaching at St. Thomas High School in Houston, I noticed in a book a figure demonstrating Monge’s Theorem. (Don't look this up … Continue Reading ››
Harry congratulates a rower after
sweeping Yale for his last time.Harry Parker died this summer, two weeks after coaching the Harvard rowing team to yet another sweep of all four races (varsity, JV, freshmen, and spares) against Yale and two days after accompanying his 1980 Olympic … Continue Reading ››
Tomoko Fuse is a Japanese origami artist whose designs are highly geometric. A Google search for her origami models reveals a plethora of boxes and intricate three-dimensional structures, many of which are folded from multiple sheets of … Continue Reading ››
I had the immense good fortune this year to attend ICME, the International Congress on Mathematical Education. The Congress is held every year divisible by 4, and this iteration (the twelfth) was held in Seoul, Korea. It is quite something to be at a meeting of nearly 4000 … Continue Reading ››
As a student, I didn’t place conic sections on my list of favorite high school topics. The standard textbook treatment of the ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola seemed uninspired. There were messy algebraic equations with multiple square roots. There was lots of terminology. Drawing a conic meant plotting several points on graph paper and connecting them with … Continue Reading ››
At around Pi-hour on Friday afternoon we successfully launched our new website. The night before (the night of the big storm for Bay Area folks), Andres and I were out with a dear former colleague and I mentioned I was going to blog about our new branding, new website, and new name. She said, “You … Continue Reading ››
Functions are hard for students. Students seem to master various families of functions – linear, polynomial, exponential, trigonometric, and so forth. They can graph them, evaluate them, transform them, and answer a variety of questions about them. But ask even our better students a question that’s out of the ordinary and we’re likely to be taken … Continue Reading ››
