mathematical enlightenment continues (except this Friday)

Hello again! The weather’s nice and math is as fun as ever. I’m continuing in my quest to show kids the compelling aspects of it.

Calculus II is neck deep in integral applications. Today, for example, we examined the finer points of using definite integrals to calculate the volume of regions that result from taking a two dimensional shape and rotating it about some axis.

Calculus I has recently covered implicit differentiation, which might be the most intimidating-sounding topic they cover this quarter (though not the hardest). They also discovered the method for finding derivatives of inverse functions, and immediately applied that to finding the derivatives of fun things like arcsin and arccos.

Precalculus’s graphing review continues. We’re now all about translations, and we’ll be moving on to other transformations soon.

Math for Mathematicians taught me something new today. I had people working on inserting mathematical symbols (+ – * / () v ^ ! = ) into the times between 3:00 and 3:59 to form true equations. For example, given the time 3:26, we could say 3 * 2 = 6. Some of these get quite hard. For example, 3:38:
3 = vvv (3^8)
Somebody in the class did some research and discovered multifactorials, which they used to solve 3:57. I’d never heard of multifactorials before!

Have a good one!

Mr. Hermann