"Why Teachers Should Read John Urschel's Book"

Courtesy of Math with Bad Drawings, here are five (very!) important takeaway messages from John Urschel's new book.

https://t.co/8ut7tFPLte

— Ben Orlin (@benorlin) May 15, 2019

(Tip of the cap to Alex Kontorovich.

RIP Joel Franklin (1930–2017)

Joel Franklin, one of my favorite Caltech professors, died 11 days ago. Caltech posted an obituary yesterday.

During Junior year, a bunch of us took Joel Franklin's AMa 153 course on stochastic processes (especially during the first term, which could be used to satisfy Caltech's probability and statistics requirement). I also took Joel Franklin's linear programming course during my senior year.

Let's start with a story from Steve Van Hooser: "We'll start with the best story. Steven Michael, going through his material at the end of the term, found a homework set for Stochastic Processes that he forgot to turn in. He went to Franklin's office, and described his mistake. Franklin merely said: "Well..did you do it?" And Steven said yes. "Well...is it right?" And Steven said he thought so. So Franklin wrote a handwritten message to the registrar saying something to the effect of "Dear Judith [Goodstein], please change Steven's grade in AMa153 to an A. -J.N. Franklin". And that was that."

We invited Joel Franklin as a dinner guest in Lloyd House a couple of times, and Steve recounted a couple of those in his Facebook post.

Additionally, in Legends of Caltech III, we included a story filled with quotes from Joel Franklin. They give a good idea of the Joel Franklin experience, and this compilation from Jason Kastner (which I remember finding on his website at some point) inspired me to compile quotations from other professors who uttered many witticisms. Here is a version of the story from a .pdf of a pageproof version of the book. (I am pretty sure the typo in "the Navy way" definition was corrected before the final version.)

When I was in graduate school, I suggested Joel Franklin's book Methods of Mathematical Economics for the SIAM "Classics in Applied Mathematics" series, and thankfully that worked out. (Franklin originally published it with Springer, but there was some sort of falling out, and for a while the only way to get a "new" copy was as printed notes.)

In his honor, today we should all do something in "the Navy way".

(Tip of the cap to Steve Van Hooser, who was part of our AMa 153 contingent.)

The Importance of Specifying Units

It is extremely important to specify units. :)

Also: very well-played!

(Tip of the cap to Melvin Leok.)

"Opposite" Jobs

According to this website, the "opposite" job of a kindergarten teacher is a physicist, whose opposite job is a model (so it's a directed similarity measure, as it should be, so really one should write "most different" rather than "opposite" to encapsulate the directionality).

According to this, the most different job from "mathematician" is "mine shuttle car operator".

Huzzah!

Bringing Mathematics to the Traumatized and the Perplexed

As many of you know, Steve Strogatz is one of my mathematical heroes. One of the reasons is that he's a master teacher and expositor. (Whenever I get his seal of approval for one of my articles or other efforts, I always feel like I did a good job on it.) Take a look at this new article.

Quoting Steve from this article: "So many of the things that we do in math education—and maybe more generally in education—are giving students answers to questions that they would never think of asking. By definition, that's what it is to be boring."

Conversely, this also speaks to why so many students find networks exciting from the start. They're already asking many of these questions! They just need the words and concepts to make the questions more precise to be able to answer them in a better way.

Excerpts of an Interview with Steve Strogatz about Math

Here are some excerpts of an interview with Steve Strogatz about what mathematics is, teaching math, learning math, and more.

There's some really good stuff in here!

Evaluating Fake Lecturers

Clearly, we need to repeat a recently-published set of experiments by inserting fake lecturers into the evaluation forms that we give to students.

Here is a quote from the paper's results blurb: "Without a portrait, 66% (183 of 277) of students evaluated the fictitious lecturer, but fewer students (49%, 140 of 285) did so with a portrait (chi-squared test, p < 0.0001)."

(Tip of the cap to the Improbable Research blog.)

"You come in here with a skull full of mush... and you leave thinking like a [Mathematician]."

We need to make a parody of the trailer for the movie The Paper Chase in time to show it to the new freshers in mathematics who will be joining us in the fall.

(There is also the matter of having a Scavenger Hunt. Some of you from Beverly Hills High School who are familiar with a certain chemistry teacher might find this vaguely familiar.)

And one of these years I will finally watch this movie. I have been meaning to do so for a long time.

Teachers Get the Last Laugh

Damn straight.

I have pulled my share of things too, of course. For example, I need to go dig old my exam instructions that allow the use of 'a note from your mother' and the question about mystery meat with Poisson-distributed things in it. (One of the students actually submitted a note from her mother. It include threats against both Lloydies and the Los Angeles Dodgers. There was also a comment about the potential health problems caused by generating functions.)

(Tip of the cap to Sammy Kline --- and, of course, to Katie Noyes Rogstad and her mother.)

My Old Ping Pong Coach

There is a small chance that I'll be able to get tickets for Olympic ping pong, which is the only sport that I care about in the Olympics. I decided to e-mail my old ping pong coach (Olympian Wei Wang) to see if she has any opinion about which countries have the most exciting players to watch. It would be really cool to go see some Olympic ping pong in person.

RIP Jaime Escalante (1930-2010)

I just noticed that Jaime Escalante died last night. Escalante was a teacher at Garfield High School in Los Angeles, and the movie Stand and Deliver (which I really ought to see at some point) was about him. One of my friends from grad school had him as a teacher---she's quoted in the wikipedia article---and I assume that one math major from Tech who went there had him as well. (I am using the latter phrasing because I don't know for sure.)

You can teach if you want to

The current issue of Beverly Hills Weekly lists some teachers and other staff of Beverly Hills Unified School district who are retiring at the end of this school year. Obviously, there are many familiar names on the list, but some of the familiar names are people I never actually met. Hence, let me mention the ones I actually knew:

David Knowlton: I had him for AP Physics at Beverly High. He didn't know the material he was teaching. I would often read issues of EGM during class. If one other person in the class and I got the same answer on a test, Knowlton essentially defined it as correct and there was at least one time when both of us turned out to have made the same mistake. Another time, I remember Knowlton asking me how to do a problem while I had a break during Science Olympiad (Knowlton was the coach). That problem was on the test he had given us the day before. It should be obvious from what I've written, but I didn't exactly respect him.

Scott Harvey: I had him for AP Poly Sci/Honor Econ (which were combined into one year-long course) during my senior year at Beverly. He was awesome! I appreciated the fact that he said what he actually thought and wouldn't put up with bullshit. He had a lot of critics, but typically those were people who were used to bullshitting their way through things. Harvey was one of the best teachers I had. Also, my idea for my senior-year graduation picture came from his class: he spent the entire year joking around about people flipping burgers at McDonalds, and on the day we picked up our caps and gowns, Harvey filmed each person in his class for a minute; we each wore our cap, held the spatula prominently, and said what we planned to do with our lives. I approve!

Dorothy Wong: She was my kindergarden teacher at Hawthorne School. She put up with my dinosaur fetish and let me proceed at a faster pace than the other students. (I have had numerous teachers who held me back because she wanted everybody in the class at the same place, no matter how far ahead of them I could be if they only let me see the next material.)

Dorthy Adler: She was the health ad I often saw at both Hawthorne and Beverly. At Hawthorne, she was the one to talk to in order to get home from school early. :)