Recently I was asked to be a keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Mathematical Association of Tasmania. It was also the MAT’s 50th anniversary, and I think that one of the reasons I was asked was because I was an expatriate Tasmanian who had been involved with the association in my younger days (my […]
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Dramatis persona*
Helen Chick
I've always wanted a bumper sticker that said "I'm a female, LDS/Mormon, Scout leading, geocaching, piano-playing, bicycling, mathematics educator with a PhD in maths ... and I VOTE"! I think this makes me a minority group of cardinality 1! * Since there's only one of me and "personae" is plural (I think), I've gone with dramatis persona. Visits since May 2016 |
Yesterday was the 20/12. Nobody had realised that this was a particularly auspicious date until after we had decided to hold the event about to be described; at the time we were planning it, all that mattered was that people seemed to be available at the time (although that didn’t stop outside agents imposing meetings upon […] The office clean up has begun. We are supposed to be moving at the end of January and my new office is going to be quite a bit smaller than my current one. This means that some stuff has to go. Some things are going to be easy to throw away (such as the 100+ reviews […] Apparently Benoît Mandelbrot passed away last week. He is famous for introducing the world to the idea of “fractals” — shapes that are so crinkly that their boundaries are not lovely smooth lines or planes, so that their dimensions are not whole numbers — and the “Mandelbrot set” — that famous heart-shaped blobby thing with circular […] I’ve been diverted by a nice little maths result that was only discovered in the early 1990s. Take a triangle, and divide each side into three. Now connect each of the pairs of trisection points to the vertex opposite (these are the black lines in the picture). These lines create a hexagon in the middle of […] Maths still matters to me. A lot.* Here’s a nice problem to test your spatial visualisation, posed to us by John Mason last night. Draw a net of a cube (by “net of a cube” I mean a bunch of joined up squares that if you cut out and folded correctly would give you a cube). Now turn this net into the net for a […] Here’s an idea for a great social occasion: invite a bunch of people around for the evening and solve maths problems. You think I’m joking, don’t you! There were 10 of us (I think (… I can count, I just can’t remember!)) at Anne and John’s last night, and we had a look at a few nice little […] Mathematicians have a concept called aleph-nought. It’s for counting a certain kind of infinite set. Just as “4” is the number name for the number of asterisks in the set {****}, “aleph-nought” is the number name for the number of asterisks in the set {********…}, where the … is meant to indicate that the asterisks […] |
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