Related papers: PIGTIKAL (puzzles in geometry that I know and love…
One desired outcome of introductory physics instruction is that students will develop facility with reasoning quantitatively about physical phenomena. Little research has been done regarding how students develop the algebraic concepts and…
Riddles are concise linguistic puzzles that describe an object or idea through indirect, figurative, or playful clues. They are a longstanding form of creative expression, requiring the solver to interpret hints, recognize patterns, and…
Building blocks and tiles are an excellent way of learning about geometry and mathematics in general. There are several versions of tiles that are either snapped together or connected with magnets that can be used to introduce topics like…
In this paper we propose a very specific educational challenge that teachers can use to motivate ambitious and enthusiastic mathematics students who have mastered basic trigonometry and trig functions. The objective is to lead students to a…
We describe the development of a junior-senior level course for Physics majors designed to teach Mathematica skills in support of their undergraduate coursework, but also to introduce students to modern research level results. Standard…
This article introduces a pedagogical method for {\it solving combinatorial problems} that frequently involve structures that are unfamiliar or less familiar. Indeed, an indirect method has been proposed in order to evade any possible…
Many mathematicians find mathematics aesthetically beautiful and even comparable to art forms such as music or painting. On the other hand, every year a great number of school students leave mathematics with total disillusionment and…
To what extent can we distinguish one probability distribution from another? Are there quantitative measures of distinguishability? The goal of this tutorial is to approach such questions by introducing the notion of the "distance" between…
This paper looks at how ancient mathematicians (and especially the Pythagorean school) were faced by problems/paradoxes associated with the infinite which led them to juggle two systems of numbers: the discrete whole/rationals which were…
The Art Gallery Problem is one of the most well-known problems in Computational Geometry, with a rich history in the study of algorithms, complexity, and variants. Recently there has been a surge in experimental work on the problem. In this…
This friendly introduction to tropical geometry is meant to be accessible to first year students in mathematics. The topics discussed here are basic tropical algebra, tropical plane curves, some tropical intersections, and Viro's…
How can we convince students, who have mainly learned to follow given mathematical rules, that mathematics can also be fascinating, creative, and beautiful? In this paper I discuss different ways of introducing non-Euclidean geometry to…
In an era where learning is considered a problem, we decided to go for problems for the sake of learning! The purpose of this study was to throw light on the issues involved in two forms of PBL viz., Case Study Based PBL and Research Based…
Geometric mechanics is usually studied in applied mathematics and most introductory texts are hence aimed at a mathematically minded audience. The present note tries to provide the intuition of geometric mechanics and to show the relevance…
What is the best representation for doing euclidean geometry on computers? These notes from a SIGGRAPH 2019 short course entitled "Geometric algebra for computer graphics" introduce projective geometric algebra (PGA) as a modern framework…
We collect together various facts about G_2 and Spin(7) geometry which are likely well known but which do not seem to have appeared explicitly in the literature before. These notes should be useful to graduate students and new researchers…
This is a pedagogical introduction covering maps of metric spaces, Gromov-Hausdorff distance and its "physical" meaning, and dilation structures as a convenient simplification of an exhaustive database of maps of a metric space into…
A cube is an 8-rep-tile: it is the union of eight smaller copies of itself. Is there a set with a hole which has this property? The computer found an interesting and complicated solution, which then could be simplified. We discuss some…
Distance Geometry is based on the inverse problem that asks to find the positions of points, in a Euclidean space of given dimension, that are compatible with a given set of distances. We briefly introduce the field, and discuss some open…
This survey is an invitation to recent developments in higher dimensional birational geometry.