Support my writing at Ko-FiWhat is the Axiom of Choice?
One of the easiest ways to start a (friendly) fight in a group of mathematicians is to bring up the axiom of choice. I'll explain what it is, why it's so controversial, and hopefully shed some light on how we choose axiomatic systems and what that means for the math we do.Read Post
Lockdown Recipes: Red Beans and Rice
Since we're all stuck at home and cooking more than usual, I wanted to share one of my favorite recipes from my childhood, which is also especially suited to our current stuck-at-home ways. Red Beans and Rice is a traditional Louisiana Creole dish. It's cheap and extremely easy and low effort to make. The one major downside is that it takes several hours of simmering (that don't require any attention); in normal times that's a major disadvantage, but if you're working from home that's not a problem at all.Read Post
The SIR Model of Epidemics
For some reason, a lot of people have gotten really interested in epidemiology lately. Myself included. Now, I'm not an epidemiologist. I don't study infectious diseases. But I do know a little about how mathematical models work, so I wanted to explain how one of the common, simple epidemiological models works. This model isn't anywhere near good enough to make concrete predictions about what's going to happen. But it _can_ give some basic intuition about how epidemics progress, and provide some context for what the experts are saying.Read Post
Online Teaching in the Time of Coronavirus
I’ve been spending a lot of the past week looking at different options for transitioning my teaching online for the rest of the term. There are certainly people far more expert at online instruction than I am, but I wanted to share some of my thoughts and what I’ve found.
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2019 Spring Class Reflections: Calculus
Now that the term is over, I want to reflect a bit on the courses I taught, what worked well, and what I might want to do differently next time. (Honestly, it probably would have been more useful to write this sooner after finishing the courses, when they were fresher in my mind. But I don’t have a time machine, so I can’t do much about that now.) In this post I’ll talk about my calculus class; I’ll try to write about the others soon.