In praise of some history

Jul 10 2016, 01:19

Teaching pure mathematics is not a trivial thing. You have to overcome the several barriers that were constructed by the K12 education that mathematics is a bunch of "fit this problem into that mold".

I recently had a chat with James Cummings about teaching. He said something that I knew long before, that being a good teacher requires a bit of theatricality. My best teacher from undergrad, Uri Onn, had told me when I started teaching, that being a good teacher is the same as being a good storyteller: you need to be able and mesmerize your audience and keep them on the edge of their seats, wanting more.

On the Partition Principle

Dec 20 2014, 20:45

Last Wednesday I gave a talk about the Partition Principle in our students seminar. This talk covered the historical background of the oldest open problem in set theory, and two proofs that for a long time I avoided learning. I promised to post a summary of the talk here. So here it is. The historical data was taken from the paper by Banaschewski and Moore, "The dual Cantor-Bernstein theorem and the partition principle." (MR1072073) as well Moore's wonderful book "Zermelo’s Axiom of Choice" (which has a Dover reprint!).

How Fields Became "Nobel"

Aug 13 2014, 11:18

Here is some interesting piece of mathematical history: How the Fields medal went from "Soviet award" to "Mathematical Nobel".

How Math Got Its 'Nobel'.