The New Math Seminar
Welcome to the Math Seminar page! The seminar meets every Tuesday around 5 p.m. in Wilson 411 (old number). There will be a short (15 min) talk, yummy snacks and good conversation about mathematics and teaching. Students, adjuncts and faculty are welcome to help us build a math community!   For the old Basic Notions Seminar (2007) click here .

Schedule Fall 2008
9/9: Christine von Renesse: The colored Hypercube. Yet another idea to "see" the 4 dimensional hypercube using an idea from Summer Math at Mount Holyoke College.
9/16: Christine von Renesse: Piloting Aleks in Math 150 www.aleks.com: "ALEKS is a web-based, artificially intelligent assessment and learning system. ALEKS uses adaptive questioning to quickly and accurately determine exactly what a student knows and doesn't know in a course. ALEKS then instructs the student on the topics she is most ready to learn. As a student works through a course, ALEKS periodically reassesses the student to ensure that topics learned are also retained. ALEKS courses are very complete in their topic coverage and ALEKS avoids multiple choice questions. A student who shows a high level of mastery of an ALEKS course will be successful in the actual course she is taking."   I will show how Aleks works and how I use it in Math 150. Maybe this will replace the Accuplacer one day?
9/23: Phillip Hotchkiss At first Phil will talk about WeBWorK, a free alternative to Aleks.
9/30: Julian Fleron What is Google Sketchup and how can we bring it into our classrooms?
10/7: Phillip Hotchkiss Phil will show how to use Drupal, an open source content management platform (with latex), in the mathematics classroom. www.drupal.org
10/14: Gary Merlo Gary will show how to use elluminate, an online environment that can be used to teach courses or hold online office hours. www.elluminate.com
10/21: Marcus Jaiclin The universe is non-Euclidean! Einstein showed in the General Theory of Relativity that the universe is non-Euclidean. We will run through a wonderful little proof, using monsters with fangs, that this is the case. The presentation should be accessible to all. Open to students and faculty.
10/28: Phil Hotchkiss and Marcus Jaiclin "Is Multiplication Repeated Addition?" In a recent online article entitled "It Ain't No Repeated Addition" (http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_06_08.html), Keith Devlin claimed that multiplication is not repeated addition and should not be taught as such to elementary students. Several members of our Department believe that repeated addition is an appropriate representation for multiplication and during this presentation we will explain why we believe this representation can be extended beyond multiplication of integers.
11/4: No seminar: GO VOTE :)
11/18: The Department "Fun with Manipulatives" We ordered new fantasic manipulatives for our classrooms, so come help us to explore and sort them! Everybody welcome :)

Schedule Spring 2008
1/28: Christine von Renesse: The Game(s) Nim and Northscott's Game.
2/4: Julian Fleron: Prime Patterns and Class Numbers -- very hands on :)
2/11: Phil Hotchkiss: Tangles
2/25: Julian Fleron: What is a pattern?
3/17: Jose Lopez: ideas and insights about teaching minorities in Springfield
3/24: About grants and the IDIS...
3/31: Volker Ecke: Origami
4/7: Ted Welsh: Lego in the classroom
4/14: Prep-Talk for Hudson River Conference. Peter Waite: 3 dimensional Dedecaphony