Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Teaching Mathematics In The Seventeenth And Twenty-First Centuries, Dennis C. Smolarski

Mathematics and Computer Science

In the late 1960s, many people saw a fictional vision of the beginning of the twenty-first century via the movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Early in the movie, a lunar expedition uncovers a large, black monolith in the crater Clavius. Although the movie was fictional, and computers have not yet reached HAL's ability to speak and read lips, the lunar crater Clavius does exist and is named after a sixteenth century scholar who was instrumental in introducing mathematics into the university curriculum.

Christopher Clavius (1538-1612) is often associated with the astronomical and mathematical justification for shifting from the Julian to …

Writing Mathematics-A Nut And A Bolt Of Style, Frank A. Farris

Mathematics and Computer Science

As editor of Mathematics Magazine, I see a lot of manuscripts. Some of them are written with a charming sense of style, but many of them leave me thinking that the author's only concern was to set out the mathematics clearly. This is a fine place to start, but the tradition of the Magazine is to offer things that people will enjoy reading, and this requires more than clarity. Let me explain an important step authors can take in order to make their work more attractive.