And it is with pride that I welcome you all to my first issue, and the
third issue all in all, of the Carnival of
Mathematics. I probably
should apologize as well - my announcement stated March 8th, but that
was before I really looked at the dates involved, so we did, alas, miss
the international women's day. We haven't had quite the rush that Mark
CC enjoyed, but we'll make a good
one even so.
First out, from the first half of our submissions, we have a grand tour
of didactic topics, starting out with Michael Tang, who shows us why
negative times negative is
positive,
with a touch of ring theory into the mix. Following that, Rebecca
Newburn discusses equation solving
strategies
and Laurie Bluedorn takes a historical view on the age of introduction
of formal
arithmetic.
To finish it up, jd2718 tells us about teaching complex
numbers
and your humble host has a manifesto of sorts about stimulating strong
students.
From the financial mathematics half of our submission, Matthew Paulson
analyzes payday
loans.
For the third half of the submissions, we look at humor. Scott Cram
gives us mathematical humor
cavalcade,
funky tricks with
π and more
funky tricks with
π,
including how to calculate it with frozen hotdogs. Denise brings us a
corollary to the well-known theorem that all odd numbers are
prime.
The fourth half of our submissions climb the dimensions ladder. Eric
Kidd brings us a review of a newly released e-book in linear
algebra,
and Lynet discusses visualization and abstraction of higher dimensional
entities.
The fifth half concerns itself with number theory, geometry, topology
and algebra. We start out with Mark Dominus who discusses integer
partitions and odd
correspondences. Charles Daney chimes in with diophantine
equations
- and we use it immediately, as Foxy takes us along, finding square
sums of squares in magic
squares.
For the geometric side, polymath has a proof of Morley's
theorem,
and trust me: you do want to read the proof before you look up the
theorem. Alon Levy raises the level another notch in a discussion of
infinite galois
theory
- a part of his ongoing series on galois theory. Mark Chu-Carroll steers
us over to the topology side with a discussion of
homotopy -
one of my own favourite subjects - and follows up with an introduction
to simplicial
complexes:
an invaluable tool for algebraic topology. Which brings me to the last
post - also from your humble host. an introduction to algebraic
topology.
The next Carnival of Mathematics will be hosted by Jason Rosenhouse and
the Evolution Blog.
Submissions go through Alon Levy at alon_levy1 (at) yahoo.com, through
the submission tool or
could even be forwarded by me - reachable at mikael (at) johanssons.org