Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

About Time: Visualizing Time At Burning Man, Gordon D. Hoople, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, Nathaniel Parde, Diane Hoffoss, Max Mellette, Rachel Nishimura, Virginia Gutman

The STEAM Journal

About Time was a 30 foot long, 3000 pound wooden sundial that went up in flames at Burning Man 2019. The piece reflected on the role time plays in our lives. We organize our lives around time—are enslaved to time—and yet we know so little about it. Physicists and philosophers continue to grapple with deep puzzles of time—Is time a fundamental quantity, independent of human actions or observations or is it an emergent property of our perception? This installation projected time using two sundials: a horizontal dial which swept time out across the desert floor and an …

Elaia 2019, Stephen Case

ELAIA

DIRECTOR'S NOTE in Volume 2

Each fall, the Honors Program at Olivet Nazarene University admits a small number of academically gifted students into its freshman class. From the moment they set foot on our campus, these women and men join a community of scholars, and together they read, reflect upon, and discuss the most important ideas of the past and present—all within a Christian fellowship. The first two years of the program involve a series of Honors courses, taught by a team of faculty and modeled on the historic “old-time college,” where small class relationships, interdisciplinary discussion, and debate prevailed. …

Across The Atlantic: Service-Learning In Spain And Morocco, Lauren Ward

Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement

Purdue provides many activities in service-learning each year, and though they are varied experiences, many of the same lessons can be learned. I had the opportunity to participate in two service-learning study abroad trips while at Purdue- the first to Spain and Morocco, and the second to Haiti. While on these trips, I was involved in projects that seemed very different. In Morocco, my group taught high school students about the history of mathematics during the Islamic Golden Age and how mathematics is utilized in Purdue research. In Haiti, I worked with my teammates to teach water sanitation and storage …

Mattes J., 2019. Wissenskulturen Des Subterranen. Vermittler Im Spannungsfeld Zwischen Wissenschaft Und Öffentlichkeit. Ein Biographisches Lexikon. [The Culture Of Subterranean Knowledge. Mediators In The Field Of Tension Between Science And Public. A Biographical Lexicon], Monika Schöner

International Journal of Speleology

No abstract provided.

One Story, Told Week By Week: Episodic Podcast Storytelling And The Habitat, Charlotte De Beauvoir

RadioDoc Review

The rise and success of podcasting introduced episodic storytelling in the world of non-fiction sound narrative. Delivering a story in different entries is very different from producing a one-off piece. What concrete implications does this have for the narrative? And what keeps an audience listening to a podcast, episode through episode? This article offers some answers to these questions via a case study of The Habitat, a 2018 podcast by the American network Gimlet.

Collaborative Environmental Chemistry Projects: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia And The Claremont Colleges, Katie Purvis-Roberts

EnviroLab Asia

I received a course redevelopment grant from the Claremont Colleges EnviroLab Asia for my Environmental Chemistry (CHEM139) course. This allowed me to add a focus on environmental issues in Asia to the course and, more important, co-teach the class with a colleague at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM).Te many results of that cross-Pacific teaching project are the key subject of this reflective essay.

Health Preferences And Culturally Appropriate Strategies To Reduce Bear Bile Demand In Northern Vietnam, Shannon Randolph, Laura Zhang, Lena Tran, Mai Nguyen, Kimberley Ha

EnviroLab Asia

Animal products, such as pangolin scales, rhinoceros horns, tiger bones, and bear bile have been used in East Asian traditional medicine (TM) for more than 2,000 years. However, markets for medicinal wildlife products have expanded dramatically in countries like China and Vietnam in recent decades where economic prosperity has enabled a larger proportion of the population to afford wildlife products (Olmedo et al. 2017). Related new farming and commercialization practices to meet growing international demand pose environmental and human health risks. Animal products also symbolize shared cultural and historical medical practices that are distinct from the dominant Western medical model.

Art Is I, Science Is We, Imani Beverly, Bryan Briones, Ronald E. Mickens

Georgia Journal of Science

The expression of the title has been used for some time to produce a concise summary of the major distinction between “art” and “science.” Our goal is to give a fuller and deeper understanding of this statement by discussing its meaning and interpretation within the context of a precise definition of science. We conclude that “Art is I, science is we,” captures accurately the fundamental difference between these two disciplines.

Function, Meaning, And Message Of The Natural Environtment In The Story Of Keong Mas, Adinda Bunga Utami, Nanny Sri Lestari

International Review of Humanities Studies

This research discusses the meaning and function of the natural environment in one folk tale that is well known in the Javanese community. This folktale is known in all circles of society, despite having social differences. An interesting problem in this folklore is the placement of functions and environmental meanings as the main elements of stories or tales. The focus of this research is to raise the function and meaning of the natural environment contained in one story of Keong Mas. This study aims to explain carefully the function and meaning of the natural environment which is the background of …

Third Voices Conference On Teaching Stem With Music, September 22-23, 2019, Lawrence M. Lesser

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

The third annual VOICES (Virtual Ongoing Interdisciplinary Collaborations on Educating with Song; https://www.causeweb.org/voices/) conference will be held online September 22-23, 2019. Chaired by Tiffany Getty, this conference will explore the use of song to teach STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) at the postsecondary (or secondary) level.

How To Bake A Theorem, Cache Dexter

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

We bake bread to satisfy our hunger, and we prove theorems to satisfy our hunger for knowledge and existence. Here I explore this analogy.

Tartaglia Re-Imagined, Aja Juola

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Niccolo Fontana wrote that he wore a beard because he feared his appearance was monstrous. No one should ever feel such shame about their physical appearance so I figured after all these years I would tell him to bare his scars proudly as a reminder of what he had endured and the life he led.

Applied Scientific Demiurgy I – Entrance Examination Information Sheet, Mario Daniel Martín

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This document provides all the required information needed by aspiring demiurges to sit the entrance examination for the foundation course Applied Scientific Demiurgy I in the scientific stream of the Bachelor of Applied Demiurgy at the Topological Hyper-university of Technological Cosmology.

Our Binary World, Simona Carini

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

A poem about counting in binary, life, and love.

Tuesday, Ursula Whitcher

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

"It's Tuesday, and the week's no longer new . . ." This poem's form is taken from the structure of the field with seven elements: the meter, in iambs, follows a pattern based on 5, 4, 6, 2, 3, the nontrivial values taken by powers of 5 (mod 7) as it generates the group of units of the field.

What Is Math?, Christopher Ryan Loga

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Here is presented a poem examining what math is and is not and the conclusions (if any) we can draw as such.

A Life Of Equations Shifting To A Life Of Words, Thomas R. Willemain

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

As my technical life diminishes, my writing life increases. Since 2017 I have been writing, first a memoir of my time in the Intelligence Community, then poetry and flash fiction.

One of the missions I have assigned to my poetry is to expose to `regular' people the inner life of the mathematical person. The poems in this poetry folder develop three themes. "Formulations'' pokes a bit of fun at the bloated (and in this case almost musical) titles that can grow from our research; more seriously, it documents the change in self-definition that flows from recognizing the inevitable drift away …

Book Review: The Seduction Of Curves By Allan Mcrobie, Hans J. Rindisbacher

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This review emphasizes, as does the compelling and beautiful book, The Seduction of Curves by Allan McRobie, the “lines of beauty” that link art and mathematics. McRobie and his collaborator on the indispensable visuals of the volume, Helena Weightman, succeed admirably in connecting theoretically and visually the mathematical field of singularity or catastrophe theory and its graphical representations on the one hand and the seemingly intersecting lines around the volumes of the human body in the artistic representation of the nude. This book thus constitutes a creative and illuminating overlap of mathematics and art that lets the practitioners on both …

Book Review: What Is A Mathematical Concept? Edited By Elizabeth De Freitas, Nathalie Sinclair, And Alf Coles, Brendan P. Larvor

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This is a review of What is a Mathematical Concept? edited by Elizabeth de Freitas, Nathalie Sinclair, and Alf Coles (Cambridge University Press, 2017). In this collection of sixteen chapters, philosophers, educationalists, historians of mathematics, a cognitive scientist, and a mathematician consider, problematise, historicise, contextualise, and destabilise the terms ‘mathematical’ and ‘concept’. The contributors come from many disciplines, but the editors are all in mathematics education, which gives the whole volume a disciplinary centre of gravity. The editors set out to explore and reclaim the canonical question ‘what is a mathematical concept?’ from the philosophy of mathematics. This review comments …

Ducci’S Four-Number Game: Making Sense Of A Classic Problem Using Mobile Simulation, Lingguo Bu

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Ducci’s Four-Number Game is a classic mathematical puzzle appealing to a wide audience for its procedural simplicity, mathematical richness, and aesthetic values. This article first describes a few activities appropriate for school students and mathematics teachers to make sense of the intriguing behavior of the game. Then, using a mobile simulation, we delve into the lengths of the Four-Number Game and the corresponding probability distribution. The Ducci number game is playful, engaging, and full of mathematical surprises.

What Are The Odds At The Russia 2018 Fifa World Cup?, Gunhan Caglayan

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In this note we explore the group stage competition format in a standard FIFA World Cup Soccer Championship group phase. The group stage involves thirty-two teams divided into eight groups of four teams each, based on a draw that takes the national teams’ seeding and geographical location into consideration. Each of the four teams in a given group is scheduled to play one match against every other team in the same group. Upon the completion of six games in each of the eight groups (for a total of 48 games), the top two highest scoring teams (the winner and the …

Everyman's Climb, Charles A. Coppin

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Hal and Verity represent two different philosophies of learning, one used by most of us. In today’s world, authentic teaching is indeed a heroic act, but may not be the most popular. This piece draws distinctions between these choices, each time we teach a course, each day we walk into the classroom, and even when working with an individual student; they are ever present.

Differential Equations Of Love And Love Of Differential Equations, Isaac Elishakoff

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In this paper, simple ordinary differential equations are discussed against the background of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In addition, a version of this relationship in a somewhat opposite setting is considered. It is proposed that engineering mathematics courses include this topic in order to promote additional interest in differential equations. In the final section it is shown that vibration of a single-degree-of-freedom mechanical system can be cast as a love-hate relationship between its displacement and velocity, and dynamic instability identified as a transition from trigonometric love to hyperbolic.

Beyond The Classroom: Mathematics In Service, Jeana Mastrangeli

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Mathematical expertise demands effective thinking and learning methods, and these techniques transfer well to other domains. In this article, I discuss how my own training as a pure mathematician influenced my performance in three disparate domains: electrical engineering, art appreciation, and learning Italian. In electrical engineering, the focus is on how mathematical reasoning and thinking processes impact knowledge acquisition and problem solving. Appreciating and analyzing art raises the question, “How do we know for certain?” Acquiring fluency in another language is akin to gaining mathematics proficiency, and here, I explore the human side of persistence. The article combines narrative, reflection, …

Mathematics Students As Artists: Broadening The Mathematics Curriculum, Marshall Gordon

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Mathematics has often been referred to as an art. For some it is “the purest of the arts”, where the mathematicians’ art is “asking simple and elegant questions about our imaginary creations, and crafting satisfying and beautiful explanations”. Yet with classroom time given primarily to “covering the curriculum”, testing, and practicing problem-solving procedures, students’ opportunities to appreciate the aesthetic dimension of mathematics are often limited. To promote a responsive environment in an effort to enable students to become artists of their own mathematics experience, I consider in this paper two facets of the mathematics classroom. Content-wise I make the argument …

A Few Firsts In The Epsilon Years Of My Career, Heidi Goodson

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In this essay, I describe the unexpected ways I achieved some milestones in the early years of my career.

A Graph-Based Analysis Of Anton Chekhov’S Uncle Vanya, Stanislaw Zawislak, Jerzy Kopeć

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

We analyze the famous Anton Chekhov play Uncle Vanya by means of graph theory. Moreover, we make the ‘brave’ suggestion that Chekhov might have used graphs to represent the plot of the play and the relationships between characters. Our analysis also includes the analysis of a specific performance of the play held in Bielsko-Biała which differs slightly from the original script. The differences between the two versions are traced via graph-based analyses. When a first round of clique assignments did not give much insight we transformed them via a sequence of operations on consecutive graphs. The final graphs obtained this …

Mathematics Versus Statistics, Mindy B. Capaldi

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Mathematics and statistics are both important and useful subjects, but the former has maintained prominence in the American education system. On the other hand, statistics is more prevalent in daily life and is an increasingly marketable subject to know. This article gives a personal history of one mathematician’s bumpy road to learning and teaching statistics. Additionally, arguments for how and why to include statistics in the K-12 and college curricula are provided.

Finding Beauty: A Case Study In Insights From Teaching Developmental Mathematics, Victor Piercey, Geillan Aly

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

As mathematicians, we often fail to appreciate the opportunities open to us when we teach developmental mathematics. One such opportunity is that we may deepen our understanding of mathematics that we have taken for granted. This paper contains a brief case study concerning what we have learned about operations, inverses, and exponents in the process of teaching beginning algebra. Our inquiry takes us from student questions about signed numbers, through the category of rings, to the world of Lie groups and Lie algebras.

Public Recognition And Media Coverage Of Mathematical Achievements, Juan Matías Sepulcre

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This report aims to convince readers that there are clear indications that society is increasingly taking a greater interest in science and particularly in mathematics, and thus society in general has come to recognise, through different awards, privileges, and distinctions, the work of many mathematicians. We provide examples of recognition accorded by institutions, societies, schools, communities, academies, and the public in general to these mathematicians.