Republic of Mathematics blog

Archive for January 2011

Ï€ does go on forever (unpredictably)

Posted by: Gary Ernest Davis on: January 26, 2011

Reuters new agency reported on January 20, here 2011 that a Japanese systems engineer, Shigeru Kondo, had used a home-built computer to calculate to  trillions of digits and thereby  broken the existing Guinness Book of Records entry for calculating . A sentence toward the end of the report caught my eye: “Calculating a more accurate […]

Listening: a critical variable in learning mathematics

Posted by: Gary Ernest Davis on: January 23, 2011

Students not listening At the beginning of every semester I talk students through the written instructions on the website for the mathematics course they are taking. This semester, Spring 2011, those courses are Differential Equations, and Mathematical Statistics. I talk the students through course arrangements including submission of written material using LaTeX for writing mathematics, […]