Sunday, February 9, 2014

A Mathematical Adventure Underway!

My apologies for the relative silence.  We're back and running, somehow.

Today's entry is relatively brief but pretty exciting.  For the last two summers, I've taught a Chaos "Maxi" course at HCSSiM:  three weeks, 2.5 hours every morning and 3 hours of problems most every evening, with 15 of my best teenage friends.  The course was based on the Chaos half of my "KAM-Geometry" course that I teach at Walter Payton, but I sussed it up with more analysis and other theoretical math, and of course I cared a little less about students "getting" everything (so long as they weren't totally lost).  What a pair of crazy adventures those courses were!


Our annual "Toga Day" (do mathematics while dressed like Ancient Greek mathematicians)


Batman comes to help us prove the completeness of Fractal space under the house-dwarf metric


A board of conjectures

This spring, I'm teaching the high school version of the course -- but I've decided it won't be a high school version.  Instead, we'll do as much of the sussed-up, proof-heavy, analysis stuff as we can: because it's cool, because it makes the course math (instead of "here's another cool observation, wonder why it happens?"), and because I think the kids can do it.

We do the formal definition of limit tomorrow ... I'll let you know how it goes!

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