Books by Number - The Improbability Principle

In my last blog post on exploring math history through children’s books I reviewed three biographies of Ada Lovelace. Now it’s the gentleman’s turn: Fibonacci, Einstein, and Erdos. (Sorry I couldn’t get the umlaut over the o, it is pronounced air-dish.)   For this post I have read Odd Boy Out: young Albert Einstein by Don Brown, The Boy Who Loved Only Math: the improbable life of Paul Erdos by Deborah Heiligman and illustrated by LeUyen Pham and Blockhead: the life of Fibonacci written by

Over this summer I participated in Google Summer of Code 2017 (GSOC).This was my second and final time participating. I was again coding for SAGE Mathematical Software System with Dr. Paul Fili and Dr. Ben Hutz as my advisors.  This year my project was titled “Expanding the functionality of Dynamical Systems". My goal was to implement  Well’s Algorithm, strengthen the numerical precision in canonical_height(), as well as implement reduced_form() for higher dimensions.  For the first part of

As a mathematician, who also happens to work in a library, I have found myself working in the children's department a few times. When in Rome do as the Romans do, so I started to read of zombies and pirates and princesses. I enjoyed myself more than I like to admit. That’s when I started to wonder... I wonder what books they have on math... I wonder what books they have on math history. Finding the 510’s, where math books are in the Dewey decimal system, I began to peruse. Some of the books

For the first part of GSOC I  be implemented Wells' Algorithm. This can be found in Elliot Wells' paper Computing the Canonical Height of a Point in Projective Space. This algorithm gives us another way of measuring the canonical height of a mapping. However, Wells' Algorithm (WA) doesn't require you to factor the resultant.  Calculating a the resultant is easy, but factoring the resultant can be hard, as factoring is hard.  No this may sound odd, as we know every integer has unique prime

Over this summer I am participating in Google Summer of Code 2017 (GSOC).This will be my second , and sadly final, time participating in GSOC. (The funding so nice you can only get it twice! Plus, I'd have to still be a student and lucky for me I just graduated with my M.A. in mathematics from Saint Louis University!)   I will again be coding for SAGE Mathematical Software System, an open source database. An open source database is made up of code available for public use and modification.

TFAE stands for “the following are equivalent.” This statement is fairly common in mathematical theorems. Why, you may ask? Well, there is a lot of power in being able to do something multiple ways. It gives us options to find one that can best fit our mathematical needs. A very familiar example of equivalency would be the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, it tells us we can either evaluate the integral or anti-differentiate. A less familiar example is Euclid’s propositions 5 and

As biographies go, you want to be enthralled, you want to be reminded what you already know and learn more. With graphic novels, and now graphic biographies and memoirs, as a growing Genre I thought a comparison of three I read would be insightfull. I'm enjoying this genre so much I just couldn't resist. Special thanks to Steenz, my library friend for turning me on to graphic novels in general. The graphic biographies I read were The Case of Alan Turing: The Extraordinary and Tragic Story of

Coming in at 253 pages, this is the little book which is full of mathematical gold. Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote The Number Devil in 1998. This was when I was 8, and in 4th grade. How did I miss this gem? I would have fallen down the mathematical rabbit hole even sooner. Disguised as a novel, the math in this book includes: Pascal's Triangle, Fibonacci Numbers, set theory, factorials, math 'tricks', and math history. It even has a brief excerpt of Russell's proof that 1+1 equals 2 (although

For my undergraduate thesis my focus was in knot theory, a subset of topology and a newer subject in mathematics. These are not the knots we think of in our daily life. The knots I studied had no ends and no thickness. Knots as we know them in everyday life have been around since before the Greeks. The book of Kells is decorated with intricate knot work. Sailors have used them on their ships. The Incas even used them to keep track of their accounting. The Incan civilization started in modern day