On the way to pick up exams from the Registrar’s Office, which nobly maintains long hours this exam week, I stopped to pick up a Sunday paper for them. I had no money, and the store said they couldn’t give …
The burly Russian dive master assured us that we had nothing to fear, that sharks do not attack humans. But as we started to hop over the side of the boat, I noticed that he was putting on chain mail gloves. …
Math has finally renumbered our courses according to difficulty, with Linear Algebra moved from Math 211 to its central spot Math 250 and the core courses moved to the middle of the 300s, with the pre-core electives below and the …
Humans have been investigating mathematical objects for thousands of years, and yet there is still so much more to investigate. Over 2000 years ago, Archimedes penned a letter to Diogenes describing a new method for computing areas and volumes. He …
You can sign up to give a 15-minute talk by March 4, 2013. On Saturday April 6, 2013 Williams College will be hosting the 20th Annual Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference (HRUMC). One of the first conferences of its kind, HRUMC was …
The Lunar New Year, also called the Spring Festival, is the most important traditional holiday in China. It is also celebrated in some other eastern Asian countries. It refers to the beginning of the new year based on the Chinese …
134 students from Mt. Greylock and BArT High Schools attended this morning’s Williams College MathBlast, dedicated to the memory of founder Professor Olga R. Beaver, who passed on four days earlier. Sponsored by the Williams Center at Mount Greylock and the …
The theory is that traditional (incandescent) light bulbs waste lots of energy by producing more heat than light. Let’s look at the bigger picture. I’m a big fan of saving energy: I go shopping with my car just once a …
In statistics, we draw conclusions from data. But to get data, we need to be able to measure the variable(s) that we are interested in. Measuring can be very crude (say, a trait is absent or present) or rather sophisticated …
