Group items tagged

How many times have you prepared an updated or new dynamic math or science PowerPoint or Keynote presentation for class and it would not open in school? Also, how many times has it happened to your students when it's time to give a class presentation? Now you need to postpone their presentation to another day, disrupting even the best planning.

Conceived by Mathematica creator and scientist Stephen Wolfram as a way to bring computational exploration to the widest possible audience, the Wolfram Demonstrations Project is an open-code resource that uses dynamic computation to illuminate concepts in science, technology, mathematics, art, finance, and a remarkable range of other fields.\n\nIts daily-growing collection of interactive illustrations is created by Mathematica users from around the world, who participate by contributing innovative Demonstrations.

This unit looks at visualisation as it relates to mathematics, focusing upon how it can be used to improve learning. It will also identify ways in which to make more use of visualisation within the classroom....

The OpenScience project is dedicated to writing and releasing free and Open Source scientific software. We are a group of scientists, mathematicians and engineers who want to encourage a collaborative environment in which science can be pursued by anyone who is inspired to discover something new about the natural world.

"The open repository of interactive high school lesson video modules sponsored by MIT's Learning International Networks Consortium (LINC) has unveiled an updated website. Every lesson, filmed in high school classrooms from Brooklyn to Beirut to Bangalore, is still a complete resource that includes video segments, a teacher's guide, downloadable hand-outs, and a list of additional online resources relevant to the topic. Since first appearing in these pages six months ago, the library of videos has grown to over 50 math and science lessons, all freely available to teachers as streaming video, Internet downloads, DVDs, and videotapes."

"The number of unfilled positions has been halved since the study's authors last explored the topic in 2006, but institutions surveyed during the 2011-12 academic year still reported they were unable to fill about one-quarter of their job openings. The study will appear in the April 2013 edition of the American Mathematical Society publication Notices."

Abstract: "In spite of the efficacy of Operations Research (OR), its tools are still underused, due to the difficulties that people experience when describing a problem through a mathematical model. For this reason, teaching how to approach and model complex problems is still an open issue. A strong relation exists between (video) games and learning: for this reason we explore to which extent (real time) simulation video games could be envisaged to be an innovative, stimulating and compelling approach to teach OR techniques."

Three math courses among those recommended, offered via partnership with Coursera

An open source "general-purpose" computer algebra system.

"Mathics is a general-purpose computer algebra system. Enter queries and submit them by pressing Shift + Return. See the gallery for some neat examples or the documentation for a full list of supported functions. Mathics uses MathJax to display beautiful math."

"Developing a 21st Century Global Library for Mathematics Research discusses how information about what the mathematical literature contains can be formalized and made easier to express, encode, and explore. Many of the tools necessary to make this information system a reality will require much more than indexing and will instead depend on community input paired with machine learning, where mathematicians' expertise can fill the gaps of automatization. This report proposes the establishment of an organization; the development of a set of platforms, tools, and services; the deployment of an ongoing applied research program to complement the development work; and the mobilization and coordination of the mathematical community to take the first steps toward these capabilities. The report recommends building on the extensive work done by many dedicated individuals under the rubric of the World Digital Mathematical Library, as well as many other community initiatives. Developing a 21st Century Global Library for Mathematics envisions a combination of machine learning methods and community-based editorial effort that makes a significantly greater portion of the information and knowledge in the global mathematical corpus available to researchers as linked open data through a central organizational entity-referred to in the report as the Digital Mathematics Library. This report describes how such a library might operate - discussing development and research needs, role in facilitating discover and interaction, and establishing partnerships with publishers."

A description of mathematicians' and other scientists recent boycott of Elsevier publishing for its high prices and practices to hinder open distribution of scientific knowledge, as well as a comparison of scholarly mathematics journals pricing among major publishers, and introduction to an ongoing movement of mathematicians organized to fix a "broken" scholarly publishing system

Forthcoming June 2012: "From the pyramids and the Parthenon to the Sydney Opera House and the Bilbao Guggenheim, this book takes readers on an eye-opening tour of the mathematics behind some of the world's most spectacular buildings. Beautifully illustrated, the book explores the milestones in elementary mathematics that enliven the understanding of these buildings and combines this with an in-depth look at their aesthetics, history, and structure."

Abstract: "The principal aim of this study is to find the weaknesses of secondary school students at geometry questions of measures , angles and shapes , transformations and construction and 3-D shapes. The year 7 curriculum contains 4 geometry topics out of 17 mathematics topics. In addition to this , this study aims to find out the mistakes, 28 , 7th grade students made in the last 4 exams including two midterms and two final exams.To collect data, students were tested on two midterms and two final exams using open-ended questions on geometry to analyze their problem solving skills and to test how much they acquired during the year.Frequency tables were used in data analysis.To fulfill this aim in the first midterm exam the subject measures were tested.In the first final exam which followed the first midterm exam in addition to measures and angles shapes skills were also tested. Following these tests , in the second midterm we tested the students on transformation and construction. A descriptive methodology and student interview were used in the study to analyze and interpret the results. The results from this study revealed that 7th grade secondary school students have a number of misconceptions, lack of background knowledge, reasoning and basic operation mistakes at the topics mentioned above."

LOG IN January 24th 9pm ET: http://tinyurl.com/MathFutureEvent Music and mathematics have been linked together for thousands of years, but rarely have students had the opportunity to explore the many connections that exist between them. To try to fill this gap, Mike Thayer of Hyperbolic Guitars is developing a course. At the event, we will discuss the course outline, as well as math and music links in general. All events in the Math Future weekly series: http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/events The recording will be at http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/HyperbolicGuitarsCourse Event challenge! Help Mike find a resource - a web page, a video, a music piece - to go with one of the topics in the course outline. Full syllabus and details of the outline: http://hyperbolicguitars.wikispaces.com/Math+%26+Music+Course Major topics: What is sound, anyway? The physics of waves The mathematics of waves Resonance Elasticity The generation of sound by "simple" systems The vibrating string The vibrating rod The vibrating plate (e.g., drumhead or cymbal) Open and closed pipes The Helmholtz resonator (--> the vocal chords) White noise, pink noise The concept of "timbre" The perception of sound Human listeners Other "listeners": Digital recording The interaction between the generator and the listener: the science of acoustics What makes sound become music? What does a listener "listen for" in music? Basics of music and musical notation: Musical descriptions Basics of music: Psycho-physical (auditory) descriptions What makes sound "musical" (

The survey involved more than 600 "randomly selected mathematicians worldwide" and revealed that many mathematicians publish on arxiv.org, some on their personal websites, some publish in open access journals but disapprove of publishing fees, tenure and promotion influence publication, high awareness of publishing rights, little use of online collaboration tools

"Mathics is a free, general-purpose online computer algebra system featuring Mathematica-compatible syntax and functions. It is backed by highly extensible Python code, relying on SymPy for most mathematical tasks and, optionally, Sage for more advanced stuff. Get Python if you don't have it already (you probably have it if you're on Linux or a Mac)."