Author Archives: Xander

About Xander

Xander completed his PhD in mathematics at UC Riverside in the Spring of 2020, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. His thesis, titled Fractal Zeta Functions in Metric Measure Spaces, explores some connections between the geometry of certain metric spaces, and the spectra of the Laplace operator on those spaces. He is currently an instructor at Northland Pioneer College, out in the beautiful deserts of northern Arizona.

MMM LXIX

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Calculus I—Day 14

After three weeks of instruction, we finally got to our first applications (i.e. “story problems”): exponential growth and decay models. As the problems themselves can be solved in terms of algebra techniques applied to exponential functions, it seems odd to … Continue reading

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Calculus I—Day 13

At this point in the term, we have developed essentially all of the major abstract and theoretical tools for differentiation, and have a few little loose ends to tie up before we start looking at applications of the derivative (e.g. … Continue reading

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Calculus I—Day 12

As with most people that have studied mathematics beyond high school, I first encountered implicit differentiation in my initial semester of calculus. It seemed like magic then. In the intervening years, I have seen the idea and the underlying theory … Continue reading

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Calculus I—Day 11

At the beginning of the term I made the decision / was instructed not to teach the \(\varepsilon\)-\(\delta\) definition of a limit. This class really is directed at engineering and natural sciences majors, so that is, I think, a reasonable … Continue reading

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Calculus I—Day 10

The big event of the day was returning exams. I’m not sure why, but I always feel kind of uncomfortable when I hand back exams to students that performed poorly. I’m note sure what to do with that… Anyway, the … Continue reading

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MMM LXVIII

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Calculus I—Day 9

I gave an exam during the last class, so rather than the usual format of “What I Taught”/”What Worked”/”What Didn’t Work”, I am going to talk about the exam itself. The exam consisted of 8 multiple choice questions, 8 true/false … Continue reading

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Calculus I—Day 8

I got locked out of the classroom a few days ago (fortunately, there was one other person in the building at 5:30 on a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of July, and he happened to have a key which opened … Continue reading

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Calculus I—Day 7

An exam is coming up soon, and the students are beginning to panic a bit about quizzes. I keep trying to tell them that the quizzes are a pretty low key affair (they don’t make up a huge portion of … Continue reading

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