My older daughter loves sharing math memes with me. Here’s the latest:
Steven Strogatz
34.6K posts
Mathematician, writer, Cornell professor. All cards on the table, face up, all the time.
- A great mathematician named Madhava, working in Kerala, India, discovered the power series for sin(x) in the 1300s, hundreds of years before Newton, Leibniz, Gregory, Taylor, et al. In this video, master teacher @garyrubinstein shows how Madhava did it:
- Proof by Clementine: the surface area of a sphere is 4 pi r^2 (trace around widest part of clementine 4 times)
- Finally got around to watching “Spider-Man 2”. Recognize any of his textbooks? 🙋♂️
- Students taking a first course in nonlinear dynamics and chaos (or anyone curious about the subject): Videos of lectures are freely available. Hope you enjoy them!
- The number of minutes of daylight is increasing at its maximum rate today. Happy max derivative day, everybody!
- The distinction between subcritical and supercritical bifurcations is always confusing. Today, I tried to explain it in my introductory nonlinear dynamics class.
- This book by Purcell was the best textbook I read as an undergraduate. It was so intellectually exciting, and had such fantastic pedagogy! I’m using relevant parts of it for my students this semester in multivariable calculus.












