The New Math Seminar
Welcome to the Math Seminar page! The seminar meets every Tuesday around 5 p.m. in Wilson 405. 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 2009
9/15/09: Karin Vorwerk: Update on Effectiveness of ALEKS Does success on ALEKS correlate with a good grade in our classes? Does it correlate with high school GPA or the Accuplacer result?
9/22/09: Julian Fleron:Permutations and Dance How can we use dance to improve our understanding of permutations? Can we use this for an abstract algebra class?
10/6/09: Christine von Renesse: Symmetries and Dance How can we use dance to improve our understanding of symmetries?
10/20/09: Volker Ecke: GeomLab GeomLab is a software using pictures and images to explore recursive creative processes. For an Escher-like example picture see http://web2.comlab.ox.ac.uk/geomlab/
10/27/09: Ted Welsh: Solids of Revolution Need a discretized double or triple integral? Here it is! There is Lego involved...
11/10/09: Julian Fleron: Modular Patterns in Art Spirograph, Star Polygons and the Chinese Remainder Theorem

Schedule Spring 2009
1/27: Julian Fleron: Mathematical Views of the Inauguration Come see high-resolution satellite images of last week's Presidential Inauguration in Washington DC. We will see how and why these images are: Beautiful in their own right. - An important part of the historic record. - Can be important into Google Earth to provide interactive, panoramic, 3D views of the Inauguration - almost as if you were there. - Critical to ongoing debates about crowd size. - Involve controversies about the accuracy of information reported in the press.
2/10: Ted Welsh and Anna Rokicki: The Calculus Wish List How many times has this happened to you: You're rolling along in an upper-level class, closing in on the Fundamental Theorem of the Entire Field. You come to a technical step in the proof, handled by an elementary calculus computation. And then, the unthinkable happens: an entire room full of math majors stops thinking. Calculus recall: zero. Disaster.   Anna and I are working to remedy the situation. We want to build a document of specific calculus problems used in upper-level classes that our majors will fill in as they work through the calculus sequence. What should be in this document? Which calculations do you use in your upper level classes? We'll start this conversation Tuesday at 5pm in Wilson 405. I hope to see you there!
2/17: Foundations Meeting This week the regular Math Seminar is cancelled. There will be a meeting about the foundations courses at Julian Fleron's house at 5:15 instead.
2/24: Christine von Renesse: Mathematica at Westfield I will show how to use mathematica on our department laptops in the classrooms. Then we can play with mathematica to get used to its syntax...

 

 

 

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 :)
11/25: Christine von Renesse and Phil Hotchkiss "Assessment Tools and Learning Communities" Phil and I will share about our experience at the learning community conference in NYC. We will talk about assessment tools and learning comunities in general. Everybody welcome :)
12/02: Volker Ecke and Julian Fleron "George Hart's Talk" Volker and Julian will share about the great talk that George Hart gave a few weeks ago. Lots of beautiful geometry... 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