Recent content by mathwonk

I told my wife about this IQ thread and she reminded me of an experience with one of our kids. The IQ tester asked him (at age 4 or 5 ?) to say as many different words as he could in 1 minute. He immediately started to count quickly : "one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine...

hang in there mr.cheeto. and make sure those books are there for your family.

Thanks for motivating me look this up. It seems Ramanujan's first two attempts at wider recognition were via letters in late 1912 to Hobson and H.F.Baker, mathematicians known to me for (books on) analysis and algebraic geometry respectively. His letter in January 1913 το Ηardy, a number...

I do sometimes enjoy taking tests, but my goal was to earn a PhD. After that sitting, UWa offered me a fellowship. Test taking can be a profit - making enterprise, if you are good at it. I enjoyed meat lugging too, but it only paid $4 an hour. A multi -year fellowship for a few hours work...

In some PhD programs, one earns a masters by progressing far enough to pass the prelim exams. A long time ago, I walked into the UWa math dept, was allowed to sit for, and passed, their math PhD prelims in one sitting, never having registered for any class there. Did I earn a masters in that...

my 2 cents: To my knowledge, IQ tests aim to measure in part: vocabulary, analogies, memory, numerical problem solving, spatial skills, and mental speed. These attributes are helpful in pursuing stem subjects, but possibly even more important are: interest, curiosity, creativity, and especially...

Perhaps in the domain of the universal quantifier "for any positive epsilon"? Naively, perhaps the tension is between the necessity of dealing with one such epsilon at a time, and the desire to contemplate the collection of all of them?

I don't recall how far into the book I got before I quit doing it, but when I was first hired as a college calc teacher, using Thomas and Finney, 4th edition, I worked every problem at the end of the section we would cover the next day, so I would not be embarrassed if a student asked how to do...

......Or to put it another way, after all these years, Achilles has apparently still not quite caught up to the tortoise.

This discussion seems to continue (here and elsewhere) without limit. However, at least in my lifetime, I suspect it will never be infinite.

It is even easier to construct products and quotients of segments using similar triangles, i.e. triangles constructed within the same vertex angle, having parallel bases.

Interesting question. I haven't thought much about it, but if I understand, I think the point here is that, if one is given a unit segment, and also segments representing x and y, then from them one can construct segments representing both xy and x/y. I.e. although given only a unit segment...

@Roberto Pavani: As a geometer, I share your point of view, as did Euclid. I.e. real numbers are essentially lengths on a line, (after choosing a unit length). One can also treat them as areas of rectilineal figures. In Prop. I.45, he shows how to construct a parallelogram (actually with...

I should have mentioned I was the original referee for Riemann's paper. Unfortunately I rejected it for lack of detail, but they apparently found someone less critical! [just kidding: I was actually the most recent reviewer: https://kendrick.press/Bernhard-Riemann-Collected-Papers.htm]

Is it possible there are people today who think kids no longer need to know Euclidean geometry!? Or the Riemann - Roch theorem? Perhaps I was born slightly too early. Am I also wrong they at least still need to know how to change out the toilet tank flapper?