Today in class, the history of math and engineering in West Africa and in Egypt. It’s a great topic that I hope I did justice to, because looking at the development of mathematical concepts in very different cultural contexts can possibly help us not take math too much for granted–it’s not just a fixed [...]
Tags: history, science, teaching
Posted in academic | 8 Comments »>Three things:
1) At the end of the summer, I asked a lot of people for book recommendations. While I am still very busy, I’m not dissertation-crazy busy, and I have time to read fiction (and non-academic non-fiction) again. My friends are wonderful people, and I got a lot of great recommendations, and I’m [...]
Tags: books
Posted in personal | 3 Comments »>It felt like fall this morning, strong winds and swirls of dead leaves on the ground, that dark gold quality to the sunlight. This afternoon, it’s summer again, like it’s been all week, but this morning? Felt like fall. We don’t get much of that out here.
Tags: autumn
Posted in personal | 1 Comment »>I’ll confess to being completely surprised by the students in my seminar. The seminar deals with the theory of evolution by natural selection, how it was developed and how it’s been applied and interpreted in the 150-plus years since. There’s an attitude that seems to be common among my students that I just [...]
Tags: darwin, history, teaching
Posted in academic | 8 Comments »>Best thing I’ve found so far this semester (and it had me laughing out loud on the bus this morning), from the second volume of Janet Browne’s Darwin biography. She’s talking about Alfred Russel Wallace, specifically his trips through Malaysia, and she mentions that he spent part of the trip caring for an infant [...]
Posted in academic | 3 Comments »>So hard to find time to write anything. It’s been a whirl of lectures, receptions, and visiting friends and family; currently buried under a pile of Hellenistic astronomy and mathematical geography. Sneaking away from Ptolemy and Aristarchus just long enough to say hello.
Matt’s father is the current out-of-town visitor, and last night he [...]
Of all the things I could be posting about, why yes, I’m going to try and assemble my thoughts about Wikipedia first. Why? Because apparently I can’t get away from it. First it was the matched set of articles in the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly, then a series of weblog [...]
Tags: wikipedia
Posted in academic | 14 Comments »>
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