GSOC 2017

As an educator I see a lot of students with varying levels of math anxiety. Some are so anxious they forget simple things, such as what is 2 times 3, and that every number that ends in five is divisible by 5. I'm always looking for new ways to help my students lessen their math anxiety, and as we know I love a good Children's book. So when I saw "Math Attack" by Joan Horton,  Illustrated by Kyrsten Booker I was excited. Finally a children's book about ( what I was hoping) how to overcome math

I recently found another children's book biography of Ada Lovelace. I had previously reviewed  Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine written by Laurie Wallmark, illustrated by April Chu, Ada's Ideas  by Fiona Robinson, and Poet of Science written by Diane Stanley and Illustrated by Jessie Hartland.  The newest addition is Who says Women Can't be Computer Programers: The Story of Ada Lovelace by Tanya Lee Stone, illustrated by Majorie Priceman. These small books manage to cover quite a

Computers are everywhere. They are in our phones, cars, and microwaves. Some people believe that computers are smarter than humans, but this a misconception as computers only do what humans tell them to do. A computer may be better at adding than you, but trust me you are smarter!  Software Developers and others tell computers what to do by writing programs, these are essentially list of instructions for the computer, we call these algorithms.  Code is what makes up the software on your phone

In my last blog post on exploring math history through children’s books I reviewed three biographies of Ada Lovelace. Now it’s the gentleman’s turn: Fibonacci, Einstein, and Erdos. (Sorry I couldn’t get the umlaut over the o, it is pronounced air-dish.)   For this post I have read Odd Boy Out: young Albert Einstein by Don Brown, The Boy Who Loved Only Math: the improbable life of Paul Erdos by Deborah Heiligman and illustrated by LeUyen Pham and Blockhead: the life of Fibonacci written by

Over this summer I participated in Google Summer of Code 2017 (GSOC).This was my second and final time participating. I was again coding for SAGE Mathematical Software System with Dr. Paul Fili and Dr. Ben Hutz as my advisors.  This year my project was titled “Expanding the functionality of Dynamical Systems". My goal was to implement  Well’s Algorithm, strengthen the numerical precision in canonical_height(), as well as implement reduced_form() for higher dimensions.  For the first part of

As a mathematician, who also happens to work in a library, I have found myself working in the children's department a few times. When in Rome do as the Romans do, so I started to read of zombies and pirates and princesses. I enjoyed myself more than I like to admit. That’s when I started to wonder... I wonder what books they have on math... I wonder what books they have on math history. Finding the 510’s, where math books are in the Dewey decimal system, I began to peruse. Some of the books

For the first part of GSOC I  be implemented Wells' Algorithm. This can be found in Elliot Wells' paper Computing the Canonical Height of a Point in Projective Space. This algorithm gives us another way of measuring the canonical height of a mapping. However, Wells' Algorithm (WA) doesn't require you to factor the resultant.  Calculating a the resultant is easy, but factoring the resultant can be hard, as factoring is hard.  No this may sound odd, as we know every integer has unique prime

TFAE stands for “the following are equivalent.” This statement is fairly common in mathematical theorems. Why, you may ask? Well, there is a lot of power in being able to do something multiple ways. It gives us options to find one that can best fit our mathematical needs. A very familiar example of equivalency would be the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, it tells us we can either evaluate the integral or anti-differentiate. A less familiar example is Euclid’s propositions 5 and

As biographies go, you want to be enthralled, you want to be reminded what you already know and learn more. With graphic novels, and now graphic biographies and memoirs, as a growing Genre I thought a comparison of three I read would be insightfull. I'm enjoying this genre so much I just couldn't resist. Special thanks to Steenz, my library friend for turning me on to graphic novels in general. The graphic biographies I read were The Case of Alan Turing: The Extraordinary and Tragic Story of