History of this Weird Little Thing
HEY,
Do you want to see how I teach completing the square? Wait...you don't? Ah well, here's the link just in case you change your mind.
Want to watch a talk I gave about teaching kids to explain their reasoning? Oh, yes, I understand, we're all so busy. Here's the link, just save it for later.
The number "googol" was named in the 1940 book "Mathematics and the Imagination," which I nabbed a copy of and discovered is very much a product of its time. Quoth the book: "The word radical, favorite call to arms among Republicans, Democrats, Communists, Socialists, Nazis, Fascists, Trotskyites, etc., has a less hortatory and bellicose character in mathematics."
The book also talks about a symbol called the "ultraradical" which is (apparently) a symbol you can use to describe the solution of x^2 + x = a. I would love to know more about the history of this weird little thing.
"When We Cease to Understand the World" is a slim novel about science and the destruction that seems to inevitably follow in its wake. Put another way: it's about abstraction and its costs. Much thanks to @sarcasymptote for recommending it, and I now recommend it to you.
One of the chapters in that book, by the way, is about Alexander Grothendieck. Lucky for you, Rivka Galchen profiled him in The New Yorker, "The Mysterious Disappearance of a Revolutionary Mathematician."
Twitter can be good: a thread on short, well-written philosophical works; a classic Catriona geometry puzzle; give your students cookies at the end of the year; the Riemann Rearrangement Theorem.
A bunch of stuff in here made me laugh, "Diseases All Woodmont Alumni from 1971 to 2021 Should Immediately be Screened For."
"What is a Good School, and Can Parents Tell?" There is more to school quality than test-scores, and some of these other things can be measured.
I hope things get better soon! Especially for us all!
-Michael