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This is a reproduction of an article titled “The Knight-Darwin Law” by Francis Darwin (son of Charles Darwin), originally published in 1898 in the journal Nature (vol. 58, number 1513, pp. 613–636). Due to its age, it is now in the public domain. I’m posting it here for the convenience of readers of my paper [...]

In this post I’ll informally describe a result in the last chapter of my dissertation. I really like this result because it seems to say so much while simultaneously being pretty simple—so simple in fact that by itself it wouldn’t warrant a PhD, so it had to be bundled with a lot of much harder [...]

The Ohio State University was established in 1870 and I taught calculus there the very first semester. I graduated the second semester. Of course, that’s a lot less impressive if you know it just switched to semesters in 2012. That, combined with my winding path through community colleges of various quarter-semester configurations before my time [...]

Near the start of this year, I turned 29 years old. I had an interesting dream around the time of my birthday. I was hanging out with a friend, slightly older than me. He was showing me a video he had made a decade ago. “I put it on YouTube, and all the other sites [...]

A student of mine complained to me that he knows calculus but does poorly on tests. I decided to do a little research to find some tips for this student to help overcome his test anxiety. Here are the tips I came up with from various websites. Diet: On the day of the test, eat [...]

Artificial Intelligence—the strong type, that science fiction writers like to go on about—isn’t easy to study. Kind of hard to study something when you don’t even know what exactly it is you’re studying! Especially when you’re a mathematician and definitions are your bread and butter. I’m definitely nowhere near smart enough to solve any of [...]

This is the official page where I’ll post LaTeX tips and tricks as I discover them. At the moment, it’s extremely sparse. I plan to update over the years, adding tips as they occur to me. If you have any tricks of your own, feel free to put them in the comments and maybe I’ll [...]

In my opinion, The Big Lebowski is the funniest thing ever caught on film. And I thought of an interesting take on it, something I thought was extremely clever, something original. The idea was that I’d do an analysis and point out how the entire film is one gigantic Buddhist koan. I even started typing [...]

As regular readers will have noted, this blog was dead for a long time. I wrote the short joke article Dark Calculus on December 17th (!) and then neglected the place til May 6th. The excuse was that I was busy with things like my dissertation and teaching—and indeed I was—but I think there’s a [...]

On April 11th, my students took a difficult integral calculus test. What they didn’t know at the time was that I also took a difficult test that day. But the test I took was all backwards. At the integral calculus test, one authority figure observed while an audience of students took the test. At my [...]