Hello,
I usually aim to write this thing under calmer circumstances than 20 minutes before I run off to teach but, you know, it’s been that sort of week/month/year. Here is the best I’ve got for this week:
- My book Teaching Math With Examples has started arriving in the mail! Some people like it! You can find it on Amazon or directly from the publisher.
- A colleague asked me if I was interested in reading Timothy Chow’s “A beginner’s guide to forcing.” I said that I would, even though it’s definitely too hard for me. But one thing I like about it is it talks about “open exposition problems,” which he describes “Solving an open exposition problem means explaining a mathematical subject in a way that renders it totally perspicuous. Every step should be motivated and clear; ideally, students should feel that they could have arrived at the results themselves.”
- A lot of that “forcing” paper is all about models. Here’s how I think about models: a computer simulation. You have some set of axioms, and that’s the rules. And you program those rules into a computer, and then that’s your simulation. You can have multiple simulations that follow those rules. Maybe you have some “axioms” that describe how gravity is supposed to work. And maybe you can indeed run a computer simulation that looks like normal Planet Earth that uses those rules. But maybe there are cool nonstandard simulations you can create also! Maybe you can have the source of planetary gravity not at the center of the world but from some other source point in the simulation. Maybe your rules aren’t as good at describing gravity as you thought they were. Maybe they’re consistent with everyone just being able to fly around all the time. Anyway, I don’t know, that’s how I think about it.
- This week I’m reading “Year of Lear” by James Shapiro and it’s awesome. It had me wanting to rewatch a production of Lear, and I found this nice one – apparently staged to be especially comprehensible to kids – from the Royal Shakespeare Company on YouTube.
- “The Number Ones” is my favorite running music column, I’ve shared it before, and this piece on U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” was awesome.
- Carl Sagan explaining how to find the circumference of the world if you’re an Ancient Greek, I think this came via Austin Kleon’s newsletter but I can’t check because class starts now in 5 minutes.
- Wohoah! That was the bell. I had my timing wrong.
- Beast Academy remains awesome, this is a sleek Desmos version of a Beast Academy activity.
- OOOOOOOK I should probably get to class.
- Definitely need to say goodbye now.
Goodbye,
Michael