These notes are a growing collection. Many of the notes are just stubs (e.g. juggling). Some of them are thoroughly developed pieces of writing (e.g. Alan Lakein’s Life Goals Exercise). Despite their length and level of polish, they’re all things that I thought were worth noting.
The best way to navigate them is to use the Notes menu, and search. Alternatively, you might find the Tags helpful to find notes around a similar topic. There are tags which group posts according to how polished or sketchy they are.
These notes were inspired by:
Summary: Things I wish that I’d known when I started teaching. [full page]
Summary: What does the $\sin(x)$ button on a calculator really do? [full page]
Summary: A write-up of a question about loop manipulation and braid groups. [full page]
Summary: This talk introduces infinite limits by playing with a mysterious function in Python. It was originally given at Lester B. Pearson Collegiate in Scarborough on 2024-02-12. [full page]
Summary: Thoughts about why it is so easy to overthing blogging. [full page]
Summary: This is a list of texts that I often recommend to people together with comments about those books. It is especially heavy on mathematics books, speculative fiction, and writing advice. Links to the Toronto Public Library and UToronto Library are provided. [full page]
Summary: Thoughts on how to design assessments which are valuable to students beyond completion, and which can be re-used over multiple years. [full page]
Summary: This note collects various references related to blogging. Why people blog, how to blog, etc. [full page]
Summary: Advice that I offer to all students everywhere. [full page]
Summary: Things to Think about Coming back from Sabbatical “What is the role of books in this course?” “Lots of people are smart; be compassionate and smart. [full page]
Summary: Links to juggling resources. [full page]
Summary: A collection of resources about exercise. Why it is important, how to do it with minimal equipment, etc. [full page]
Summary: All graduate students eventually hit a point where facing the academic job market becomes inevitable. In my experience, it was intimidating to finally come to the end of my studies and start to reach out to the broader academic community. [full page]
Summary: Introduction In this write-up, I’m going to talk about the Kruskal-Dynkin count, a card trick based on mathematics. I’ll give a heurisitic argument for why the trick works, and then present some experimental data about how the trick changes as the values of the cards change. [full page]
Summary: A list of things to prepare for a generic course. [full page]
Summary: Esperanto is a made-up language with a surprisingly rich literary tradition. I’m reading all of it. [full page]
Summary: I have wanted to build a sundial for a long time. Recently, I got inspired by Reinhold Kriegler‘s brilliant reflected sundial. [full page]
Summary:
How I’ve set up my ttys on Linux to be more user friendly. Switching fonts, keys, and backlights.
[full page]
Summary: How I use a twenty year old word processor to write code and upload it to the cloud. [full page]
Summary: These are some notes about and care tips for the plants that I have in my office. [full page]
Summary: A poem by Nanao Sakaki about the distance that one could walk in a lifetime of walking. [full page]
Summary: This is a checklist of things that I need to do on a weekly basis for work. It was inspired by Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. [full page]
Summary: I’m a fan of an old book on time management: How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life (1973) by Alan Lakein. [full page]
Summary: At the University of Toronto, we receive annual merit-based pay raises through a process called “Progress Through the Ranks”. This note is to intended to describe a setup for keeping track of information and documents relevant to PTR. [full page]
Summary: Last year, I did all of my course document preparation using docstrip, a standard component of LaTeX. It was revolutionary; docstrip allowed me to prepare all of my course documents in one large LaTeX project while maintaining a consistency of style across many formats including slides, quizzes, tests, and even posts to our learning management system. [full page]
Summary: From Ed Burger: Suppose that $N$ cards are placed on a table with $F$ of them face up. You know the values of $N$ and $F$, but you are unable to see the cards. [full page]
Summary: MathPrograms.org has tonnes of undergraduate research experience opportunities, but primarily focussed on the US. If you’re interested in mathematics, and based in Toronto or Canada, then there are a number of opportunities worth investigating. [full page]
Thanks for reading! If you have any comments or questions about the content, please let me know. Anyone can contact me by email.