Making Your Own Sense
Reflections on maths, learning, and the Maths Learning Centre.
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Where the complex points are: on a real circle
In 2016 I created the iplane idea, which allows you to locate the complex points on a real graph. Ever since I had this idea, I have wondered on and off about the complex points on a circle. It's time to write about what I've found.
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The memory of His Royal Highness
Once upon a time, I met a His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent.
Twelve matchsticks: focus or funnel
One of my favourite puzzles is the Twelve matchsticks puzzle. It goes like this:
Quarter the Cross: Colouring
Quarter the Cross is one of my favourite activities of all time, whether in maths or just life. I learned about it way back in 2015 and have been mildly or very obsessed with it ever since.聽This blog post is about one particular version of the Quarter the Cross problem you might like: the colouring version!
Roosters don't lay p-values
I've just started teaching an online course, and one module is a very very introductory statistics module. There are a couple of moments when we ask the students to describe how they interpret some hypothesis tests and p-values, and a couple of the students have written very lengthy responses describing all the factors that weren't controlled in the experiments outlined in the problem, and why that means that the confidence intervals/p-values are meaningless. When all we wanted was "we are 95% confident that the mean outcome in this situation is between here and here".
Twitter and how not to treat my students
I have learned a lot from Twitter about how to treat my students, and most of it has been through being treated in ways I do not like. Recently I have been searching my own tweets to find things I've said before, and as I've dipped into old conversations, several unpleasant feelings have resurfaced when I read the way I've been treated. I don't want to make my students feel that way, so I want to avoid doing those things to my students.
Which Number Where
Last year I invented a game called Digit Disguises聽and it has become a regular feature at One Hundred Factorial and other events. But before Digit Disguises came along, there was another game with a similar style of interaction that we played regularly, and this blog post is about that game. The game is called "Which Number Where?"
Where the complex points are: on a complex line (again)
It's been four years since I came up with the idea of iplanes as a way to organise the complex points on a graph, and in the intervening time I have thought about them on and off. For some reason right now I am thinking about them a lot, and I thought I would write down some of what I am thinking.
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The MLC Date Blocks
This blog post is about a piece of the MLC learning environment which is very special to me: the date blocks. It鈥檚 a set of nine blocks that can be arranged each day to spell out the day of the week, the day number, and the month. I love changing them when I set up the MLC in the morning, so much so that since the face-to-face MLC closed due to COVID-19, I brought them home and have been changing them each morning here in the dining room. The story of how this object came into the MLC is the reason it is so special to me.
One Hundred Factorial - the puzzle and the event
The weekly puzzle session that I run at the 成人大片 is called . In the middle of the night, I suddenly realised that I have never written about聽why it is called One Hundred Factorial, and so here is the story.
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