Archive for December 2010
Do mathematically less able students unnecessarily complicate things?
Posted by: Gary Ernest Davis on: December 30, 2010
A few anecdotal experiences, separated widely in time and space, have led me to speculate that less able mathematics students might be unnecessarily complicating procedures and examples, to the point where the complication impedes their learning. Guess my number A colleague at the University of Melbourne in Australia told me, many years ago, about her […]
Experimenting in mathematics to get a feel for what's what. Quantifying what you don't know.
Posted by: Gary Ernest Davis on: December 16, 2010
Easy to state, hard to solve, mathematics problems Some easily stated mathematical problems are just too had for anyone currently to be able to solve. Some outstanding examples are: Goldbach’s conjecture: every even number is a sum of two prime numbers. the conjecture: when we start with a positive integer and repeatedly apply one of […]
