Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Does The Test Work? Evaluating A Web-Based Language Placement Test, Avizia Long, Sun-Young Shin, Kimberly Geeslin, Erik Willis

Faculty Publications

In response to the need for examples of test validation from which everyday language programs can benefit, this paper reports on a study that used Bachman’s (2005) assessment use argument (AUA) framework to examine evidence to support claims made about the intended interpretations and uses of scores based on a new web-based Spanish language placement test. The test, which consisted of 100 items distributed across five item types (sound discrimination, grammar, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and vocabulary), was tested with 2,201 incoming first-year and transfer students at a large, Midwestern public university. Analyses of internal consistency and validity revealed the …

Cmsc 2018: 4th Creative Mathematical Sciences Communication Conference, Frances Rosamond

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Join scientists, researchers, teachers, and artists in developing new ways of communicating mathematical and computational thinking. Welcome are contributions in art forms such as dance, graphic art, theatre, and the myriad of ways to communicate science to the public. The conference will feature keynote talks by leading researchers and communicators in the mathematical sciences, sharing their experience, new initiatives, and ideas. The conference will be held in Wellington, New Zealand, at The Learning Connexion (TLC) on 21--23 July 2018. The conference website is http://www.cmsc.nz.

Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal Special Issue Call For Papers: Numbers, Shep Steiner

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Mosaic, an interdisciplinary critical journal, is pleased to announce a call for papers for a special issue on Numbers. Please submit your essay to the Editor using Mosaic’s online submission portal (http://umanitoba.ca/mosaic/submit) by March 9, 2018. The issue is currently scheduled to appear in September 2019.

Jesus And The Walnuts, Hugh C. Culik

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In “Jesus & the Walnuts,” a hapless English professor invokes fragments of mathematical thought to integrate his hunger for a knowable world with his affection for the logician with whom he shares an office. While “not even wrong” and horribly clumsy, his aspirations are iterations of the drive for order and meaning that are shared across disciplinary knowledge . . . and the hungers of the heart.

Paperback Vs. Cryptanalysis, Terry Trowbridge

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This poem is a defiant challenge against online and app based surveillance of readers. It also questions the guesses that are used to make claims about readers using text analyses.

Theremin, David Pritchard

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

No abstract provided.

Math In Seventeen Syllables: A Folder Of Mathematical Haiku

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In our July 2017 issue, we issued an open call for mathematical haiku, which we defined to be a three-line poem in the “5-7-5” syllabic form that expressed a mathematical idea or experience, and hopefully connected it to the human condition. In deference to traditional Japanese haiku, we encouraged poets to consider using allusions to nature or the seasons in their work, or what is known as a caesura or kire represented by punctuations, space, line-break, or other grammatical break that is intended to compare two images implicitly.

We received haiku on an amazing variety of themes and subjects, from …

Book Review: Algebra In Context: Introductory Algebra From Origins To Applications By Amy Shell-Gellasch And J. B. Thoo, Cindia D. Stewart

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This is a review of Algebra in Context: Introductory Algebra from Origins to Applications, a textbook authored by Amy Shell-Gellasch and J.B. Thoo. The text presents traditional mathematics through the lens of history, allowing students to gain a rich understanding of how mathematics works and where it comes from. In addition to providing the reader with a summary of the book contents, the reviewer suggests why and how the text may be incorporated into college-level mathematics courses.

Mathematicians Versus Philosophers In Recent Work On Mathematical Beauty, Viktor Blåsjö

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Recent attempts at defining mathematical beauty fall roughly into two schools of thought. One takes its starting point in the subjective experience of the mathematician and characterises mathematical beauty in cognitive terms. The other seeks to reduce beauty to objective notions such as truth, symmetry, or simplicity. This second approach is popular among analytic philosophers, who are committed to seeing mathematics and science as prototypically rational enterprises. I criticise this stance on the grounds that this commitment makes its supporters approach beauty in mathematics not with a genuine desire to sympathetically understand it, but with the preconceived goal of explaining …

The Origin Of The Group In Logic And The Methodology Of Science, Paolo Mancosu

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

The Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science at UC Berkeley was founded in 1957. It has been a key institutional element in carrying out Tarski’s vision for making UC Berkeley one of the most important centers of logical research in the world. In this brief history, I look at the emergence of the Group in Logic with an eye towards understanding the circumstances that made it possible.

My Sets And Sexuality, Andres Sanchez

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

It was only with the application of set theory to my own personal life that I discovered my true identity and sexuality. In this exploratory, personal essay, I detail my own discovery of my sexuality through mathematics and how this math has become a lens through which I view the world. And, with new knowledge of literary criticism in hand, I can now retroactively describe the thoughts I had in this discovery process.

Fun, Not Competition: The Story Of My Math Club, Johanna Hardin

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

For almost three years, I have spent most of my Sunday afternoons doing math with my daughters and a group of their school friends. Below I detail why and how the math club is run. Unlike my day job, which is full of (statistical) learning objectives for my college students, my math club has only the objective that the kids I work with learn to associate mathematics with having fun. My math club has its challenges, but the motivation comes from love of mathematics, which makes it fun, and worth every minute.

In Memory Of Professor Andrei Nikolaievitch Tikhonov (1906-1993) On The 25th Anniversary Of His Death, Hayat Rezgui

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Thursday, November 8, 2018, is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of the celebrated Professor A. N. Tikhonov, one of my most favorite mathematicians. The idea of writing this paper to honor his life and scientific activities came to me as I was reading many of his works; I was impressed by his knowledge, amazing research, profound scholarship, perspicuity and eloquence of expression, painstaking accuracy, and big ideas. My aim is to be clear and evocative, for in this way I feel more in touch with my subject that is very interesting.

Cello Tangents Of Quartic Polynomials, Robert Haas Ph.D.

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This note uses easy calculus and linear algebra to analyze the situation of a line being tangent to two points of a fourth-degree polynomial curve.

Seen With Other Eyes: A Service Learning Project For High School Mathematicians Working With Visually Impaired Learners, Özgür Akas

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Seen With Other Eyes (SWOE) is a community involvement project that focuses on mathematics education for the visually impaired. In this essay I describe this project, which I developed together with my students at Robert College, a private high school in Turkey, and share some of our story. In the past few years, our work was welcomed by the global mathematics education community, as a testimony to the power of social media to connect like-minded educators with one another.

Balancing Entertainment And Learning In The Popularization Of Mathematics: The Seven Light Bulbs Problem, Man Keung Siu

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Popularization of mathematics plays a significant role in drawing more “friends of mathematics” from the public, which is important for the healthy and prosperous development of the discipline. The issue of a suitable balance between entertainment and learning is constantly on the minds of those who put effort into this task. This article discusses this issue in the context of mathematical museums and describes a simple problem involving seven light bulbs to illustrate its main points.

To Fall In Love With Math, Do This, Susan D'Agostino

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In the viral New York Times essay, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” Mandy Len Catron details an experience she and an acquaintance had as they shared responses to psychologist Arthur Aron’s thirty-six questions intended to make participants fall in love. She notes that, “we all have a narrative of ourselves that we offer up to strangers and acquaintances, but Dr. Aron’s questions make it impossible to rely on that narrative.” In this paper, we claim that we also have narratives of our relationship to mathematics that we offer up to ourselves and others. Following, we offer a …

The Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal: A Bibliographic Report, Nurullah E. Goren, Tiffany Zhu

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

The content of the Humanistic Mathematics Network Newsletter was reviewed by Claire Skrivanos and Qingcheng Zhang in [1]. This report reviews the content of the Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal (1992-2004).

A Survey Of The Math Blogosphere, Katherine Thompson

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This article provides an overview of different types of mathematical blogs currently available. There are over twenty blogs highlighted, ranging from the technical to the recreational, from those sponsored by national mathematical organizations to those run by individuals--including students.

Rolling Dice On A Date, Francesca Raphael, Jennifer Switkes

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

When a young mathematician faces the prospect of a date, all kinds of mathematics ensue. Here we explore her innovative way to keep the conversation going through rolling dice to decide which conversation starter to utilize. In the course of our exploration, we solve an interesting generating function problem.

What Makes A Theory Of Infinitesimals Useful? A View By Klein And Fraenkel, Vladimir Kanovei, Karin Katz, Mikhail Katz, Thomas Mormann

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Felix Klein and Abraham Fraenkel each formulated a criterion for a theory of infinitesimals to be successful, in terms of the feasibility of implementation of the Mean Value Theorem. We explore the evolution of the idea over the past century, and the role of Abraham Robinson's framework therein.

Mathematical Arguments In Favor Of Risk In Andy Weir's The Martian, Sarah C. Cobb, Jeff B. Hood

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In Andy Weir’s novel The Martian, the characters encounter high-stakes, life-or-death situations, in which they must make choices based on their assessment of risk and likely outcomes. They have different reactions to risky situations, based on their approaches to assessing risk and their perspectives on the stakes involved. In this paper, we examine the ways that characters in The Martian intuitively assess risk and compare them to mathematical analysis of the situations in the book.

Mathematics, Writing, And Rhetoric: Deep Thinking In First-Year Learning Communities, Christine Von Renesse, Jennifer Digrazia

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Through the process of combining two seemingly unlikely bedfellows, mathematics and composition, two instructors explain how rhetoric connects the art of writing and the art of doing mathematics in an inquiry-based learning community. Combining these two courses in a learning community enables students and instructors to practice the deep thinking valued by each instructor and by a traditional liberal arts education while challenging both our and our students’ individual, disciplinary, and rhetorical conventions and beliefs. Using student writing from our course, our assignments from mathematics and composition, and survey evaluation results, we demonstrate how engaging in inquiry-based education provides unconventional …

Ways Of Relating To The Mathematics Of The Past, Michael N. Fried

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Historians of mathematics, by definition, look at mathematics of the past. But mathematicians, too, often look at mathematics of the past; mathematicians of the past themselves often looked very closely at mathematics of their own past. Is their relationship to the past the same as that of the historians? Is every view of the past an historical view? Indeed, is every historical view historical in the same way? Or is it possible that there are different kinds of relationships to the mathematics of the past? This paper will suggest that there are in fact a variety of such relationships. It …

Communicating Mathematics Across Time, Mark Huber, Gizem Karaali

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

No abstract provided.

Ideology In Physics: Ontological Naturalism And Theism Confront Big Bang, Cosmic Fine Tuning, And The Multiverse Of M-Theory, Anthony Walsh, Marc Ruffinengo

Journal of Ideology

The most profound questions that philosophers and scientists have asked across the centuries have been metaphysical and existential, such as “What is the meaning and purpose of life, why are we here, and why is there something rather than nothing?” There can be no definitive answers to these questions, so those who pose and propose answers to them necessarily engage ideology. Some physicists have become philosophers in that they are attempting to answer these profound questions with highly speculative theories as, for instance, Hawking and Mlodonow’s book The Grand Design (2010) which they tout as providing new answers to age-old …

The Santa Clara, 2018-01-25, Santa Clara University

The Santa Clara

No abstract provided.

Increasing Our Vision For 21st-Century Digital Libraries, Elizabeth M. Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Conference Presentations and Speeches

This presentation

1. Reads digital library interfaces—or their "main door" interfaces—as glimpses into what we have thus far valued in the development of digital libraries
2. Frames a visual way of thinking about textual materials
3. Introduces the work of our research team—where we are now, and where we're headed
4. Draws some connections between the parts

This presentation is very much a look into thinking in process and work in progress and proposes the following ideas:

1. As a community, we can do much more with the digital images we're creating of textual materials than we've heretofore done.
2. We aspire to have additional layers …

The Santa Clara, 2018-01-18, Santa Clara University

The Santa Clara

No abstract provided.