Dancing ones PhD

In my dealings with the internet this week, I am reminded of a quote by William Arthur Ward, the professional inspirator:

We can throw stones, complain about them, stumble on them, climb over them, or build with them.

In particular, I have been notified by two different math-related things. Firstly, most importantly and more interestingly, my friend Diana Davis created a video entry for the “Dance your PhD” contest. It’s about Cutting Sequences on the Double Pentagon, and you can (and should) look at it on vimeo. It may even be the first math dance-your-PhD entry! You might even notice that I’m in the video, and am even waving madly (I had thought it surreptitious at the time) around 3:35.

That’s the positive one, the “Building with the Internet,” a creative use of the now-common-commodity. After the fold is the travesty.

On the other hand, I have also been nominated for a blog award… but not in a good way. I received this email and notification:

Hi there,

An article you wrote in 2011 titled 2401: Additional Examples for Test 3 has earned your blog a nomination for a Fascination Award: 2012’s Most Fascinating Middle School Teacher blog.

The comments posted in response to your post prove that your content not only inspires your audience, but it also creates discussion around your posts, both of which are requirements for the nomination of a Fascination award.

As a nominee of this award, you have full permission to display the “Nominated” emblem on your website. To learn more about the contest, the rules, or the prizes, click here:

2012 Fascination Awards Rules & Prizes.

To get started:

Accept your nomination by replying to this email by August 15 (11:59 PM EST).

Claim your “Nominated” badge to display on your blog: Nominated Badge

Voting begins August 18th at 1:01 AM (EST). The blog with the most votes by August 25th at 11:59 PM (EST) will win the grand prize, a $100 restaurant gift card.

Good luck and thank you for your participation!

Matthew Pelletier

Director of Public Relations

Accelerated Degree Programs

That’s right – I am a fantastic middle-school science teacher, as demonstrated by my previous blog post when I was a TA for multivariable calculus at Georgia Tech. And what was in that post? It’s a series of links to the Khan Academy, and my students asked me five questions in the comments. One might have hoped that the Georgia Tech or Multivariable Calculus tags (or the word “integral” in the post, or the explicitly done and written integrals in the comments which *Accelerated Degree Programs* seems to have read so closely) would have clued them off.

Either Georgia Tech’s standards are really low these days, it takes an extraordinary amount of effort to become a ‘good middle school science teacher blog,’ or this is just another site that’s senselessly trying to improve their rating by spamming out things that link to their site. (I have removed all links to their site from the email so as to not actually boost their SEO attempt).

You might ask, what do they do? They seem to charge people about a hundred thousand dollars or so to give them the privilege of attending an online degree program, perhaps getting a bachelor’s in 18 months. And what were they going to give me? They were going to let me display

Or, if I won, they would let me display

I have again removed the linking aspects of these two photos, so that these are merely .pngs hanging out. Whoa – that’s… exciting… or something. It’s a little worse, as when I didn’t respond to ‘accept my nomination,’ I was emailed by Matthew Pelletier again! They are insistent, at least. And that’s the only good thing I have to say about them.

David Lowry-Duda August 7, 2020 at 4:15 pm on AboutThat's great! If there are particular plots that you're interested in, let me know. But I (very recently) posted a library for making the plots https://davidlowryduda.com/phase_mag_plot-a-sage-package-for-plotting-complex-functions/ Alternately, I make sage/python notebooks available for many of my visualizations. These are usually linked to within the post. If you see something that you want to replicate and find the code, leave a ---
Nguyen Xuan Son April 11, 2020 at 4:53 pm on AboutHi Could you please share the python code to generating beautiful plots? I plan to use it for my son to get interested in python programming. Son
David Lowry-Duda October 17, 2019 at 3:17 pm on Notes from a talk at the Maine-Quebec Number Theory ConferenceThanks Peter! You're right --- and it's a nice reference.
Peter Humphries October 7, 2019 at 4:03 am on Notes from a talk at the Maine-Quebec Number Theory ConferenceOmega results of this form using this method are presented quite nicely in Chapter 15 of Montgomery and Vaughan; they give applications towards sign changes of the Chebyshev psi function and of partial sums of the Mobius function.
David Lowry-Duda June 16, 2019 at 1:55 am on Choosing functions and generating figures for “When are there continuous choices for the mean value abscissa?”At first, we chose 2 because it was the other "obvious" point that we hadn't yet specified. We already controlled the values at 0, 1, and 3. But I later realized it doesn't matter what point we choose. What we're really doing is adding one extra degree of freedom and using it to minimize the L2 norm of the derivative ---
PC June 16, 2019 at 1:14 am on Choosing functions and generating figures for “When are there continuous choices for the mean value abscissa?”Why did you choose 2 for the pt in the L2 part? What if you chose 1.5 or something?
Donna ebert September 27, 2018 at 3:55 pm on AboutI appreciate your taking the time to reply. The version of FreeCell I play online does count taking a card from the tableau (and the Freecells) as a move when adding them to the foundation. I never realized others did not.
David Lowry-Duda (mixedmath) September 27, 2018 at 8:20 am on AboutI believe you are referring to: this post on MathSE. Yes, that's right. In the typical language, a "move" consists of one mouse-click-and-drag action. When there are open freecells, it is possible to move multiple cards using one mouse operation (as a shortcut to doing all the card moves individually). As an example, if all 4 freecells are open, you ---
Donna September 27, 2018 at 1:38 am on AboutI see nowhere to submit an email so I am asking my question here. On another site you answered a question about the average number of moves to solve Freecell. You gave an in-depth answer about the studies that had been done (thank you) which was 45. What I cannot comprehend is how anyone can move 52 cards, one at ---
David Lowry-Duda (mixedmath) September 24, 2018 at 6:33 pm on An intuitive introduction to calculusThank you. You could also write $P(t) = ae^{kt + C_1}$. But this may give the impression that $a$ and $C_1$ carry different data --- but they don't. To see the equivalence, you can write $ae^{kt + C_1} = a e^{kt} e^{C_1} = (a e^{C_1}) e^{kt} = A e^{kt}$, where $A = a e^{C_1}$. There are two fundamental degrees of ---

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Dancing ones PhD

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