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mathematics posted a new favorite picture (via):

mathematics posted a new favorite picture (via):

mathematics posted a new favorite picture (via):

mathematics posted a new favorite picture (via):

mathematics posted a new favorite picture (via):

Little something I did with some photos I had hanging around.

"I didn't know sparrows were emo?™"

Celebrations for Baroque Grandeur transforms the Baroque Grandeur 3D architecture pack into a light, regal and ornate set featuring stunning frescos, stained glass windows, scroll work and upholste...

My answer:

• 1 year ago

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Inquiet asks: “What do you do when both head and heart are telling you no, but everything else (a person you’ve always trusted) is saying yes?”

My answer:

• 1 year ago

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My answer:

• 1 year ago

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Skippy W writes: “If god knows all things in all time what would be the point of creating a universe when you know exactly what will happen. Like watching a movie over and over.”

My answer:

• 1 year ago

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Cadence writes: I’ve often wondered this and I’ve concluded that maybe it does exist, but I’m curious as to others opinions and reasoning behind said question. Any thoughts?

My answer:

• 1 year ago

Asker’s Rating:

Asker’s Comment:

Thanks.

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The South and West sides are mostly bad – but there are exceptions. Hyde Park isn’t so bad. I’ve heard good things about Chatham, but can’t vouch for them. Surprisingly enough, the Southwest side is very nice, and pretty in places, if a little quiet and dull.

The North Side is mostly OK, but I’d be careful around Montrose, more than a few blocks in from the Lake – I can remember seeing a teenager walking into a building with a very large gun drawn, and nobody seeing anything odd about this – and Rogers Park (Howard Stop, Red Line) looked a little dicey. I’ve heard other people saying that they had run into trouble, there.

Cabrini-Green is a lot smaller than it used to be, but it’s still there. Bad history, so avoid Division and Halsted. … You might do better to ask about a few specific places you had concerns about; It’s a big city. Too much to cover.

My answer: Wes …

Hard to say, because you’ve obscured your answers, limiting what we know about you. I don’t know what you’re interested in.

There is a free weekly paper called “The Chicago Reader” that lists events. You can find its homepage here:

http://www.chicagoreader.com/

It has theatre listings

http://www.chicagoreader.com/theater/

listings for standup comedy

http://events.chicagoreader.com/chicago/…

and sketch comedy and improv

http://events.chicagoreader.com/chicago/…

literary events

http://events.chicagoreader.com/chicago/…

art gallery exhibitions

http://events.chicagoreader.com/chicago/…

and more. In about a month, the first outdoor festivals will be starting; you can go to some of these.

But these are things that you go see, right? Perhaps you’re looking for something to DO, that doesn’t cost a lot of money, and allows you to do more than just watch?

Since you’re poor, I assume that you live here and aren’t just visiting – travel costs money. Have you considered writing something, and showing up to an open mike night? You seem to want to skip the bars – which I think is a good idea – but have you tried some of the independent coffeehouses, such as Kopi? Much different crowd.

Join a book club, and discuss you reading. University alumni sometimes create these, and often welcome new members.

A little too quiet for you?

Perhaps you could join a local chapter of the Cacophony Society, or get one going yourself.

etc. etc. etc. What do you enjoy? Give us something to work with.

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Little Spamy writes:

Additional Details

1 year ago

My answer:

• 1 year ago

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gdancer96 writes: “My friend smokes weed and I don’t know if I should just stop hanging with her or help her stop. I want to help her but I cant people tell me that Im gonna get into trouble to.”

My answer: “people tell me that Im gonna get into trouble to”

That’s a real possibility. If you’re with her when she gets arrested for possession, you could be arrested, too, and sent to prison – even if you didn’t know that she had any pot on her, at the time!

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Madi! writes: “I have my best friend,and i really love him, and he’s ruining his life by doing drugs. He’s a football star, baseball star, everything star, all the girls love him, and he has so much potential, but i’m so worried he’s ruining everything. How do i talk to him about it?:/”

My answer:

• 1 year ago

Asker’s Rating:

Asker’s Comment:

this really helped(:

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Contrariwise / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

2011-11-12 16:20:31.888978 - in Lincoln Park, Chicago, IL, USA

The math blog that was going to be here has been moved to new locations, one on Tumblr and a mirror to it on Posterous. This is a measured response to my partial, but extremely serious displeasure with Google's actions in the recent past. I don't take kindly to censorship, least of all from a company which claims to not practice it. Yes, they eventually stopped, but something this cut and dried should never have been allowed to become a test of wills.



What Google will get, instead of a math blog on its server, will be a more practical and somewhat less interesting side blog, on which I will be discussing plans for upcoming events in the real world, some (but not all) of which will involve post Calculus Math tutoring. I will caution some of those reading this, who might be overly interested in the words "sliding scale" that I tend to offer that consideration only to students who live in neighborhoods in which one doesn't want to be seen in designer clothes - not Englewood, but not the Magnificent Mile, either. Sometimes, when we're there, the scale might even slide all of the way down to zero. "You mean ... volunteer work?" Gasp. If you want to call it that - not that I would. I call it "poor people having each other's backs".



What is, to date, a lifetime maximum salary of $6000 per year (before taxes), I would question the sanity of anybody who would deny that the label fits, in my case; we're looking at a salary closer to what one would expect to see in the Third World than in America, though expectations might be changing. As poor people, we don't have much control over the prices the rich are willing to offer for our labor, but we do have more than a little control over who it is, that we offer that labor to. So, as long as I know where my rice and beans are coming from, fairly often I'll be willing to take a fellow pauper's $2 over a rich kid's offer of $60, just to send a little of what money can buy back in a direction where it has been going unreasonably infrequently, during the last few years. If I can bring a few newfound friends along on one of these trips, all the better - and healthier, too, in some places - but understand that my trust is earned, not given, and hard earned, at that.



The tutoring of which I'll be writing will never be pre-Calculus level. I never had any trouble whatsoever understanding pre-Calculus mathematics, which might speak well of me as a past student, but not so well as a prospective instructor in those courses. Saying "this is obvious" to somebody to whom the material is not at all obvious is not helpful, but I would find myself reduced to that. I can't get inside the head of those students - most people who've been in PhD programs really can't - and so I leave that kind of tutoring to those more competent in it than I am. I can already hear some semi-faceless individual preaching to me about my supposedly not taking poor people on their own terms, to which I would respond with some well founded indignation of my own - where do these supposedly progressive people get the idea that the poor can't handle more advanced material, or shouldn't be given the chance to do so? Especially when the poor seems to have been almost the only people handling it for some years, now, in those generations that have followed the boomers?







I mentioned trust. I will sometimes be mentioning events that will often have little to do with Mathematics, and will be held in the more clearly safe parts of town, things we do just for fun. The level of trust needed for me to let you along on a trip to a book reading is a lot lower than that needed for me to invite you along to the West side. These will be the events I invite strangers along on, and on which we - if there ever is a we in the context of these events - will get to know knew people. If there never is a we ... then I guess that the readership, whoever that is, will get to read a little journaling about nerd life in Chicago.



This might be of some interest to somebody, although really - there are far better towns for such interests, so expect to feel a little frustration in these pages. But by now, you probably expected that.

Regarding the question posed at the end of my last post: Probably the main difference will be that the main blog focuses on problems other people bring up, and mirrors my Yahoo answers content, while on this one, the problems I solve will be of my own choosing. I might also write about posts on other Blogger journals of relevance to the teaching of Mathematics.



I'm still setting up a few companion accounts which will allow me to comment on some of the more common blog hosts. I will caution some of you, though, that I have little patience with Postmodernism or self-esteem based education. I do insist on rigor, and that does mean that the proofs are going to run longer than the hand waving soundbites favored by those who live to get great student evaluations. Mathematics is hard work. Anybody who tries to tell you otherwise is lying.

I find homework problems. I solve them. You read the solutions, and those solutions help you solve similar problems, helping you earn higher grades.



That's all this blog really is. It's an offshoot of a homework and answer journal I have elsewhere. I still have to work out what that means. We'll find out.

Contrariwise / Joseph Dunphy posted a new topic:

Yes, it is, sometimes, a fact that has been driving college freshmen slowly and understandably insane for years. One takes Calculus in high school, and here one is in the first year of Undergrad, and one is being told to take it again. It doesn't seem right. One gets good grades and still ends up being held back because of what? Bureaucratic whim?



Not at all. The problem is that the coverage of Calculus in High School is almost invariably quite unsatisfactory. When proofs make an appearance at all in high school textbooks, to be gentle about this, they tend to be less than rigorous, which is to say that they aren't really proofs at all. In College Calculus, this deficiency is remedied. Sometimes. Sometimes not, but I'll pass on naming some of the schools where the hapless students seem doomed to do nothing more than repeat senior year of high school, and pay thousands of dollars for the non-experience.



At best, it's a maddening way of teaching the subject to the student who, having spent a year doing a lot of calculations using cookbook mathematics, might ask why he wasn't taught the right way the first time. That's a good question. I think that I might have been given a hint as to the answer one day when, having take the time to write up a flyer explaining some of the more magical seeming claims in an atrociously written college textbook, in order to help the students understand the material a little better, I found that some of the students had gone to the department to complain about this! I actually found myself being called onto the floor.



The fact that the words "Optional Material" were written at the top of the first page of the flyer, in large letters, made no impression on the director. The fact that a few of the students had a ridiculous complaint did. Don't make waves.



It's incredible to think that a teacher can get in trouble for teaching, but sadly, that is the truth. This is the reality - a lot of school policy seems to be set just to keep students with anger management problems from complaining, and the worst students, disproportionately often, will be the first to complain. So one ends up with a curriculum that is dumbed down so that the dumbest kids will shut up, and everybody else ends up getting shortchanged in the process, a good chunk of a year of their lives completely wasted.



It's a stupid way of doing things, but in these days of senses of entitlement that are only embraced when they are truly misplaced, it has become the American way.

A counterexample, in Mathematics, is a mathematical object that, merely by existing, shows that a proposed theorem can not be valid, the failure of validity often being quite strikingly counterintuitive. The construction of these objects serves an intellectual purpose, in that they set limits on that which is provable. They serve an aesthetic purpose, in that they can be strikingly beautiful in their own way. They also serve an emotional purpose, in that they can be wonderfully effective in quieting whiny students, when the students confront the grader over the points they lost in making an invalid assumptions in some of the proofs they submitted, and say “but thaaaaat’s obviouuuuuuus!”, reducing the probability of the hapless grader developing an ulcer by the end of the week. Of course, it’s a dead on certainty that he’ll have one by the end of the year, but by then he should be able to go home and have his relatives nurse him back to health, just in time for another year of pulse pounding action in the back of the library, red pen in hand and papers stacked high. Yes, live the dream. Oh, dear G-d.

This is a companion to “Doing Your Homework”, a blog on which I’ll be working a variety of math problems.

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Taken at the Chrysanthemum Show at the Lincoln Park Conservatory in Chicago, an event that no longer occurs. This is not representative of the work you'll see on this page, but I had it laying arou...

Don't expect to see a lot of calculational content on this blog. While I do have an interest in Applied Mathematics, I'm going to be writing about that elsewhere. The focus of this blog will solidly be on Pure Mathematics, and yes, I know that the line between the two can get fuzzy.



Do expect to see proofs, yes, rigorous proofs, counterexamples, and comments about what others have written about the subject. Primarily, but not necessarily exclusively, this will be about education in Mathematics, not research in Mathematics, at the undergraduate and graduate level. No, I won't be working any high school algebra problems. There are plenty of people doing that, already. Real and Complex Analysis, Abstract Algebra, Topology ... yes. Gentle commentary ... maybe not.



I'm very, very tired of the sort of "scholar" who will speak highly of nonsense, just to win popularity contests with his students and a few of his more psychotic colleagues. Teachers aren't supposed to be friends with their students. A real teacher, at any level, is there to help his students grow intellectually, and growth hurts, never more so than at the level we're here to discuss. Maybe, after years of maturation, the students will look back and know that you did right by them. Perhaps they won't. It doesn't matter. What matters is that the teacher knows and each student, as he responds to that reality, defines himself in a way that leaves his response a sort of praise, in one sense or another, even if he doesn't think of it as such.



What you're going to get at every point is the truth. Not my truth, or your truth, but the truth, something that we can speak of with confidence in an objective field in which the basic facts are always known. This is not art or philosophy. Mathematics, unlike all of Man's other endeavors, allows one to go from step to certain step, as long as one is attentive to the details - as long as one's arguments are rigorous. When proofs run to the hundreds or thousand of pages, some degree of confidence is lost because of the fatigue of the reader, but at the level we'll be working on, that's not a problem. Thus the lack of gentleness - in Mathematics, we have precision or we have nothing. "You know what I meant" doesn't cut it, because the methodology just doesn't work that way.



For those who can accept this, links are available, and I'll start work on this in the not so distant future, probably when cold weather arrives. Expect to see some worked problem sets, which should help you when you see similar problems in your own homework - like getting to read last year's answer sets. This will give you a jump on the material, and that definitely helps. Knowing that you're ahead tends to drive away what is your single greatest enemy in the study of this subject, aside perhaps from your grader's weak grasp of the English language - panic. Fear of imminent failure can easily become reality, so let's not let that happen.



See you in a few months. I have a summer to go enjoy, and the cicadas are calling.

As an instructor of mine once said in years past to a fellow student who protested that a point in a proof was “obvious”, “In some sense, the entire subject is obvious. The question is whether or not you’ve proved something.” The mathematics that you see on this blog will be the kind that requires [...]

The math blog that was going to be here has been moved to new locations, one on Tumblr and a mirror to it on Posterous. This is a measured response to my partial, but extremely serious displeasure with Google's actions in the recent past. I don't take kindly to censorship, least of all from a company which claims to not practice it. Yes, they eventually stopped, but something this cut and dried should never have been allowed to become a test of wills.



What Google will get, instead of a math blog on its server, will be a more practical and somewhat less interesting side blog, on which I will be discussing plans for upcoming events in the real world, some (but not all) of which will involve post Calculus Math tutoring. I will caution some of those reading this, who might be overly interested in the words "sliding scale" that I tend to offer that consideration only to students who live in neighborhoods in which one doesn't want to be seen in designer clothes - not Englewood, but not the Magnificent Mile, either. Sometimes, when we're there, the scale might even slide all of the way down to zero. "You mean ... volunteer work?" Gasp. If you want to call it that - not that I would. I call it "poor people having each other's backs".



What is, to date, a lifetime maximum salary of $6000 per year (before taxes), I would question the sanity of anybody who would deny that the label fits, in my case; we're looking at a salary closer to what one would expect to see in the Third World than in America, though expectations might be changing. As poor people, we don't have much control over the prices the rich are willing to offer for our labor, but we do have more than a little control over who it is, that we offer that labor to. So, as long as I know where my rice and beans are coming from, fairly often I'll be willing to take a fellow pauper's $2 over a rich kid's offer of $60, just to send a little of what money can buy back in a direction where it has been going unreasonably infrequently, during the last few years. If I can bring a few newfound friends along on one of these trips, all the better - and healthier, too, in some places - but understand that my trust is earned, not given, and hard earned, at that.



The tutoring of which I'll be writing will never be pre-Calculus level. I never had any trouble whatsoever understanding pre-Calculus mathematics, which might speak well of me as a past student, but not so well as a prospective instructor in those courses. Saying "this is obvious" to somebody to whom the material is not at all obvious is not helpful, but I would find myself reduced to that. I can't get inside the head of those students - most people who've been in PhD programs really can't - and so I leave that kind of tutoring to those more competent in it than I am. I can already hear some semi-faceless individual preaching to me about my supposedly not taking poor people on their own terms, to which I would respond with some well founded indignation of my own - where do these supposedly progressive people get the idea that the poor can't handle more advanced material, or shouldn't be given the chance to do so? Especially when the poor seems to have been almost the only people handling it for some years, now, in those generations that have followed the boomers?







I mentioned trust. I will sometimes be mentioning events that will often have little to do with Mathematics, and will be held in the more clearly safe parts of town, things we do just for fun. The level of trust needed for me to let you along on a trip to a book reading is a lot lower than that needed for me to invite you along to the West side. These will be the events I invite strangers along on, and on which we - if there ever is a we in the context of these events - will get to know knew people. If there never is a we ... then I guess that the readership, whoever that is, will get to read a little journaling about nerd life in Chicago.



This might be of some interest to somebody, although really - there are far better towns for such interests, so expect to feel a little frustration in these pages. But by now, you probably expected that.

Regarding the question posed at the end of my last post: Probably the main difference will be that the main blog focuses on problems other people bring up, and mirrors my Yahoo answers content, while on this one, the problems I solve will be of my own choosing. I might also write about posts on other Blogger journals of relevance to the teaching of Mathematics.



I'm still setting up a few companion accounts which will allow me to comment on some of the more common blog hosts. I will caution some of you, though, that I have little patience with Postmodernism or self-esteem based education. I do insist on rigor, and that does mean that the proofs are going to run longer than the hand waving soundbites favored by those who live to get great student evaluations. Mathematics is hard work. Anybody who tries to tell you otherwise is lying.

I find homework problems. I solve them. You read the solutions, and those solutions help you solve similar problems, helping you earn higher grades.



That's all this blog really is. It's an offshoot of a homework and answer journal I have elsewhere. I still have to work out what that means. We'll find out.

Contrariwise / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

The icon for the Professional and Amateur Mathematicians group is a detail of this photo, which was taken at one of the last Chrysanthemum shows in the Lincoln Park conservatory in Chicago, before they stopped being held a few years ago.

Contrariwise / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Used for formatting text in postings to Flickr. Not good for decorating photostream, so I think I'll get this one out of the way, first.

You see, I live in Illinois, land of the eight month winter, so summer is very precious while it lasts, and I spend as much of it as I can outside. But, with Mybloglog gone, I have to hook my sites back together, and set up alternative subscription options for my journals, so I need a feed for this journal, and a post in the feed for the feed to appear, and ...



Yawn, right? But it has been a beautiful summer, and there is more of it to come.

My account primarily exists for a very simple purpose - I'm here to help you with your post-calculus math homework. That's really about it. I'm going to work some problem sets, post some counterexamples to show why some of the "nitpicking" in the proofs really isn't nitpicking, at all, and throw in a few pieces of requested advice. In other words, an outgrowth of my activity on Yahoo answers and similar services, in a setting in which the functionality isn't so frustratingly limited, and in which I go into greater depth. Think of how much easier a geometric proof will be to follow, when I can embed the diagrams into the proof.



Google offers a number of services (knols, notebooks, etc), many of which look like they'll fit nicely into my plans, which probably isn't too surprising, given the academic backgrounds of the founders of the company. When I create a new one, or update an old one, I'll write about that here, with links going to the pages in question, which will link back to here, and sometimes to my Google profile, which is going to end up being a sort of central index for my pages on Google. Yes, it will too small for listing all of those, eventually, but I can establish sub-indices for various subjects, and list and link to those sub-indices from my profile. This blog, then, ends up being an update blog for my profile, one might say.



Originally, I was going to do this from Google groups, which doesn't have as much functionality, but seems to see a lot of traffic. I might still post there, for that reason, but given the foolish decision on the part of Google to eliminate the group descriptions, I can't really link to any groups I have there. How would I link back? Where would be the clear path back to my other pages, and to any rings people might have entered from? No, far easier to discuss the updates here, mention them on Googlegroups, and then link from the posts on Google groups to posts on this blog, for those who, having seen the Googlegroups post, want to see more. Give an opening excerpt, and then a link, and if Googlegroups should be phased out at some point in the future, then I won't be losing anything of real value, and neither will the reader.



Yes, the comments are turned off on this blog. I've found that those posting them were almost always abusing the privilege elsewhere, posting spam or abuse, and so decided to be rid of them, altogether. Is that a strange choice to make for a Math help, blog? How does one get help, if one isn't free to ask for it? Perhaps, but in the beginning, I'm going to be focused on building up an archive of worked problems, and that's what the blog will be about, at first. A lot of these problems, in various forms, are seen over and over, so that archive will probably end up answering most questions, saving everybody a lot of time - and to be honest, I do have a lot of refreshing to do, as I write this. But, eventually, I'll have links to an accompanying forum, and to a profile at Yahoo answers, and maybe a few other places. Just because I'm not opening one particular route of communications, that doesn't mean that I don't ever want to hear from any of you. It just means that I'm shying away from one particular bad experience.



I hope that answers any questions, for now - and with any luck, there should be more questions that need answering, later.

I read that and was skeptical, having never heard of those before, and so I googled it, and this looks like it's for real! If so, this is wonderful news. One of the articles I found was here, with many more elsewhere. I need to start reading the news more often. This does change everything - if OPEC decides to inflict another embargo, Israel can undercut it.

"Just don't belittle the amount of extra work it makes for us. That's all." I don't mean to belittle you,...

Sigh. Most adults have taken Geometry in High School, so why does the

author persist in believing that Mathematics and Arithmetic are

synonymous, when his own coursework should have taught him otherwise, by

now?







Mental arithmetic is a memory exercise. Mathematics, for the most part,

is about the logical development of concepts. There is very little

connection between the former and the latter.

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