Mathematics Commons^™

Solving Equations: A Make-Work Project For Math Teachers And Students, Egan J. Chernoff

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

The purpose of this article is to share a particular view that I have towards solving equations in the school mathematics classroom. Specifically, I contend that solving equations in the math classroom is a make-work project for math teachers and students. For example, math teachers take a predetermined value that makes a statement true, and then proceed to make it harder and harder and harder for their students to determine the value that makes the statement true. However, math teachers do so with the explicit purpose of teaching their students how to reveal the solution that they themselves have concealed. …

Does Society Need Imo Medalists?, Man Keung Siu

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

With a title that sounds provocative but with no intention to embarrass the organizers and participants of the event of IMO (International Mathematical Olympiad) this article should be seen as the sharing of some thoughts on this activity, or more generally on mathematical competitions, by a teacher of mathematics who had once helped in the coaching of the first Hong Kong Team to take part in the 29^th IMO held in Canberra in 1988 and in the coordination work of the 35^th IMO held in Hong Kong in 1994. The author tries to look at the issue in …

Basketball, Algebra, And Probabilities, Gunhan Caglayan

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This article is an attempt to illustrate some humanistic aspects of mathematics in context, in particular, sports and scoring (basketball). The intriguing and dynamic illustrations demonstrate innovative and creative ways of integrating basketball snapshots into the pedagogy of a high school or college-level mathematics-in-context course. I have used this activity with several mathematics education students in a mathematics-in-context class as they worked in groups of five. I include here a presentation and a discussion of their explorations and analyses.

The Battle Against Malaria: A Teachable Moment, Randy K. Schwartz

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Malaria has been humanity’s worst public health problem throughout recorded history. Mathematical methods are needed to understand which factors are relevant to the disease and to develop counter-measures against it. This article and the accompanying exercises provide examples of those methods for use in lower- or upper-level courses dealing with probability, statistics, or population modeling. These can be used to illustrate such concepts as correlation, causation, conditional probability, and independence. The article explains how the apparent link between sickle cell trait and resistance to malaria was first verified in Uganda using the chi-squared probability distribution. It goes on to explain …

The Hidden Symmetries Of The Multiplication Table, Zoheir Barka

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In this article we explore some of the symmetries that hide in the distribution of numbers in the multiplication table of positive integers when viewed through modulo k arithmetic as we vary k.

Some Comments On Multiple Discovery In Mathematics, Robin W. Whitty

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Among perhaps many things common to Kuratowski's Theorem in graph theory, Reidemeister's Theorem in topology, and Cook's Theorem in theoretical computer science is this: all belong to the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery in mathematics. We are interested to know whether this phenomenon, and its close cousin repeated discovery, give rise to meaningful questions regarding causes, trends, categories, etc. With this in view we unearth many more examples, find some tenuous connections and draw some tentative conclusions.

The Graduate Student Blues, Marion D. Cohen

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This is a memoir about my rather unconventional path to a mathematics Ph.D. There were difficulties, due partly to university politics, partly to my youth and immaturity, and partly to the thesis material itself – it was, in the words of some of my fellow students, “not what’s being done now”. I had written the thesis entirely on my own, without help from my Master’s thesis advisor or any other professor at my school. This is not the usual procedure of course. Nobody in my department could understand the thesis or was willing to vouch for it. There followed three …

Every Minute Of Your Life Has Been Interesting, Susan D'Agostino

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In this short paper, we prove that every minute of your life has been interesting. We also provide four exercises intended to solidify understanding of this result, including one exercise related to the torturously boring family road trip you took as a child.

From Pythagoreans And Weierstrassians To True Infinitesimal Calculus, Mikhail Katz, Luie Polev

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In teaching infinitesimal calculus we sought to present basic concepts like continuity and convergence by comparing and contrasting various definitions, rather than presenting “the definition” to the students as a monolithic absolute. We hope that our experiences could be useful to other instructors wishing to follow this method of instruction. A poll run at the conclusion of the course indicates that students tend to favor infinitesimal definitions over epsilon-delta ones.

Badiou’S Logics: Math, Metaphor, And (Almost) Everything, Vladimir Tasic

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Mathematics plays a central role in the philosophical system of Alain Badiou. The aim of this essay is to situate this appeal to mathematics in the broader context of his work, including its literary and political elements.

Mathematical Identities, Mark Huber, Gizem Karaali

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

No abstract provided.

Why Mixture Of Probability Distributions, Andrzej Pownuk, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

If we have two random variables ξ₁ and ξ₁, then we can form their mixture if we take ξ₁ with some probability w and ξ₂ with the remaining probability 1 − w. The probability density function (pdf) ρ(x) of the mixture is a convex combination of the pdfs of the original variables: ρ(x) = w * ρ₁(x) +( 1 − w) * ρ₂(x). A natural question is: can we use other functions f(ρ₁, ρ₂) to combine the pdfs, i.e., to produce a new pdf ρ(x) =f(ρ_{1 …}

Experimentally Observed Dark Matter Confinement Clarifies A Discrepancy In Estimating The Universe's Expansion Speed, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

It is well known the our Universe is expanding. In principle, we can estimate the expansion speed either directly, by observing the current state of the Universe, or indirectly, by analyzing the cosmic background radiation. Surprisingly, these two estimates lead to somewhat different expansion speeds. This discrepancy is a important challenge for cosmologists. Another challenge comes from recent experiments that show that, contrary to the original idea that dark matter and regular (baryonic) matter practically do not interact, dark matter actually "shadows" the normal matter.

In this paper, we show that this "dark matter confinement" can explain the discrepancy between …

Hereditary Properties Of Co-Kähler Manifolds, Giovanni Bazzoni, Gregory Lupton, John F. Oprea

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications

We show how certain topological properties of co-Kähler manifolds derive from those of the Kähler manifolds which construct them. We go beyond Betti number results and describe the cohomology algebra structure of co-Kähler manifolds. As a consequence, we prove that co-Kähler manifolds satisfy the Toral Rank Conjecture: dim(H^∗(M; Q)) ≥2^r, for any r-torus T^r which acts almost freely on M.

Incorporating A Spatial Prior Into Nonlinear D-Bar Eit Imaging For Complex Admittivities, Sarah J. Hamilton, Jennifer L. Mueller, Melody Alsaker

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) aims to recover the internal conductivity and permittivity distributions of a body from electrical measurements taken on electrodes on the surface of the body. The reconstruction task is a severely ill-posed nonlinear inverse problem that is highly sensitive to measurement noise and modeling errors. Regularized D-bar methods have shown great promise in producing noise-robust algorithms by employing a low-pass filtering of nonlinear (nonphysical) Fourier transform data specific to the EIT problem. Including prior data with the approximate locations of major organ boundaries in the scattering transform provides a means of extending the radius of the low-pass …

The Mathematics Of Superoscillations, Yakir Aharonov, Fabrizio Colombo, Irene Sabadini, Daniele C. Struppa, Jeff Tollaksen

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

In the past 50 years, quantum physicists have discovered, and experimentally demonstrated, a phenomenon which they termed superoscillations. Aharonov and his collaborators showed that superoscillations naturally arise when dealing with weak values, a notion that provides a fundamentally different way to regard measurements in quantum physics. From a mathematical point of view, superoscillating functions are a superposition of small Fourier components with a bounded Fourier spectrum, which result, when appropriately summed, in a shift that can be arbitrarily large, and well outside the spectrum. Purpose of this work is twofold: on one hand we provide a self-contained survey of the …

The Proscriptive Principle And Logics Of Analytic Implication, Thomas M. Ferguson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The analogy between inference and mereological containment goes at least back to Aristotle, whose discussion in the Prior Analytics motivates the validity of the syllogism by way of talk of parts and wholes. On this picture, the application of syllogistic is merely the analysis of concepts, a term that presupposes—through the root ἀνά + λύω —a mereological background.

In the 1930s, such considerations led William T. Parry to attempt to codify this notion of logical containment in his system of analytic implication AI. Parry’s original system AI was later expanded to the system PAI. The hallmark of Parry’s systems—and of …

The Maximum Number Of Complete Subgraphs Of Fixed Size In A Graph With Given Maximum Degree, Jonathan Cutler, A. J. Radcliffe

Department of Mathematics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In this article, we make progress on a question related to one of Galvin that has attracted substantial attention recently. The question is that of determining among all graphs G with n vertices and Δ(G) ≤ r, which has the most complete subgraphs of size t, for t≥3. The conjectured extremal graph is aKr+1 ∪ Kb, where n = a(r + 1) + b with 0 ≤ b ≤ r. Gan et al. (Combin Probab Comput 24(3) (2015), 521–527) proved the conjecture when a ≤ 1, and also reduced the general conjecture to the case t = 3. We prove …

A Refined Approach For Non-Negative Entire Solutions Of Δ U + Up = 0 With Subcritical Sobolev Growth, John Villavert

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

Let N≥2and 1uis a non-negative classical solution of the Lane–Emden equation, thenu≡0. The method of moving planes combined with the Kelvin transform provides an elegant proof of this theorem. A classical approach of Serrin and Zou, originally used for the Lane–Emden system, yields another proof but only in lower dimensions. Motivated by this, we further refine this approach to find an alternative proof of the Liouville type theorem in all dimensions.