Oh, Canada. We’re very late to this one and it is way outside our territory, but it feels necessary to post something. In December the Ontario Superior Court, in a 3-0 decision, ruled that requiring prospective teachers to pass Ontario’s Mathematics Proficiency Test (MPT) violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The reason? According […]
We have a question. One of the simplest possible fraction multiplications is 1/3 x 1/5 = 1/15 The question is, why? What is your simplest explanation of this equation? To make the task absolutely clear, the explanation is to be suitable for an imagined average primary school student who is just being introduced to the […]
In his press conference today, Prime Minister ScoMoFo gave the new definition of “close contact”: And the definition for a close contact is as follows … except in exceptional circumstances, a close contact is a household contact … of a confirmed case only. A household contact is someone who lives with a case or has […]
We’re a little out of steam right now. Some big posts are planned, but it’s difficult to gather our strength to write them. In the meantime, we’ll keep things going with a few light and easy posts. A while back we posted some (still unanswered) puzzles by Tony Gardiner, as well as the excellent article […]
Yesterday we met for the first time a very nice fellow, who reads this blog and who occasionally comments. He gave us the present above, obviously with a hat tip to our vodka shtick:
I briefly mentioned Mike Deakin in this post, and I talked about him (too) briefly in Mathematics in Hell (at 6:40). I’ll be having reason to refer to Mike in a future post. As background, the following is an Age article Burkard and I wrote about Mike Deakin in 2014, one of our final Maths […]
It is astonishing the extent to which Australians don’t give a shit about what happens to Julian Assange. He can be kept in a Kafka prison, undergo a Kafka trial at the behest of a country who openly want to torture him, and probably kill him. But no one except a very few good guys, […]
Fresh off our successful defense of Alan Tudge, it’s time to go into bat for a nazi. Sort of. Last month, Lehigh University’s newspaper, The Brown and White, reported on the removal of a young mathematician, Brian Klatt, from his classes. Klatt’s removal came after “an anonymous complaint that alleged [Klatt] was posting racist, misogynistic […]
We’ve been working on a post defending a nazi,* so we may as well warm up with a try on Tudge.** The first thing to say is that Tudge is an asshole. As we wrote on another occasion, Tudge is a nasty, down-punching, vindictive, glass-jawed, born to rule shithead. He should have ceased to have been a Minister long, […]
The following is an article by Tony Gardiner, originally published in 1996 in the Mathematical Gazette. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of Tony, the Chief Editor of the Mathematical Gazette and the Mathematical Association. The original article is available on JSTOR, here (via an educational library), and we’ve also separately posted the […]