Republic of Mathematics blog

A few semesters ago I began to teach differential equations to sophomore undergraduates through extended projects, using  professional grade tools – MATLAB, Maple and Mathematica – that scientists and engineers use in their practice. An older student in the class was a technician at a nationally known engineering company. He was re-training to be an […]

This post is about the following fact: for whole numbers . Sometimes this is called the distributive property of multiplication over addition, and sometimes it is called the distributive law. Some people are uncomfortable with use of the word “law”, as if it were passed by fiat and we darned well better follow it or […]