Creativity in mathematics and beyond

This is your brain on technology!

Feb 7, 2011

May years ago I wrote an essay titled On becoming a website. It was about my experience on teaching online and I suggested somewhat facetiously that in order to be a good teacher online I needed to actually "become" the course website! I started the essay by...

Unlocking education… news story

Jan 29, 2010

Our very own Leigh Wolf is quoted in a story in today's State News. Check out, Education unlocked: MSU professors use open courseware to provide class materials for students Leigh manages to bring in the MAET program in to the picture (why am I not surprised?) and how...

On breaking the rules (and words)

Jul 11, 2010

My daughter on her blog has a new poem / haiku called Sweat, a haiku with one glich. She is in India right now where the temperatures are easily in the 90's - which I guess explains the genesis of the poem. What was more interesting, to me however, was the manner in...

Design, Intuition & Creativity

Apr 3, 2018

Chain-Rotational ambigram design for the word "design."One can read the word both clockwise from the top or anti-clockwise, from the bottom. Our latest article in the series we write for the journal TechTrends (under the broad rubric of Rethinking Technology...

Bad poetry time: Clerihews

Mar 15, 2009

Just when you thought I had run through all the bad poetry I can spew (see here for my palindromic poems) here is another set of poems I had all but forgotten about. A few years ago I got hooked into writing Clerihews. For the uninitiated: The clerihew is a bit of...

Technologies “R us: A great essay by Adam Gopnik

Aug 9, 2011

This morning I was at the doctor's office and picked up a dated (February, 2011) New Yorker magazine and discovered a great essay by Adam Gopnik: The Information: How the Internet gets inside us. I am not sure how I missed this the first time around but Gopnik does a...

Lego based Sudoku & Rubik Cube solving robots

Sep 15, 2009

Two robots made entirely using Lego Mindstorms NXT Retail-kit that can solve Sudoku problems and the Rubik's Cube! How totally cool is that. LEGO Mindstorms is a line of Lego sets combining programmable bricks with electric motors, sensors, Lego bricks, and Lego...

Using eclipses to see

Mar 27, 2009

Let me start with two questions: First, what is the shape of the Earth? And two, what shapes does the sun cast on the ground when filtered through the leaves of a tree? Of course we know the answer to the first question. The pictures from space show clearly this...

Value in an age of free…

Feb 6, 2008

What happens when an economy "built on selling precious copies" suddenly confronts the world of the Internet - a world based on the "free flow of free copies?" Kevin Kelly confronts this issue in a recent post titled, Better than free. As he says, "how does one make...