01.30.08

First day of 1a

Posted in Math 1a, Spring 2008 at 11:43 am by leingang

It’s shopping period, so my Math 1a class today was basically an advertisement for the course. I clicked through the Introductory presentation and handed out copies of the syllabus.

Here’s one of my favorite slides.

I want students to know that my goal is not to prevent them from succeeding, but to enable them to succeed. Even though a college-level math course is a lot of work, we try to provide support with office hours, problem sessions, and homework help in the Math Question Center

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Tags: mathmath1a slideshow humor

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Happy First Day of Class

Posted in Math 1a, Spring 2008, Math 21a, Spring 2008 at 6:50 am by leingang

Math 21a meets in sections, so it won’t start officially until Monday the 4th.  But Math 1a has its first meetings today and Friday.

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01.29.08

Spring 1a

Posted in Math 1a, Spring 2008 at 3:56 pm by leingang

I was the course head for Math 1a (Introduction to Calculus) last fall, and I’m happy to be continuing it in the Spring.  The material will be the same, but in the spring there will only be a single section.  So I’ll have less administrative overhead and more time to concentrate on a smaller number of students.

I’m also trying a new blogging idea.  Rather than keep separate blogs on each of my course websites, I’m putting as much on my office blog and filtering it to the other sites with RSS feeds.  We’ll see how that goes. 

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01.25.08

A Note on the NFL Single-Season Touchdown Receptions Record

Posted in Math, Sports at 8:24 am by leingang

One of my Math 1a students this past term is a member of the new Harvard Sports Analysis Collective. They enjoy sabermetrics and the analogues in other sports. And it’s not just a hobby; a couple of ivy leaguers (Paul DePodesta and Theo Epstein) have gone on to manage major league baseball teams using statistical analysis to change the way players are valued.

I had an interesting discussion on their mailing list about DVOA, a statistic to measure defense in football which I thought I invented but turned out to have been beaten to the punch by Aaron Schatz several years ago. On a less mathy note, Jason blogged a little bit ago about the single-season touchdown records set recently by Randy Moss and Tom Brady:

The previous holder, Jerry Rice, only played 12 games in the year he caught 22 touchdowns (A 24-day players’ strike reduced the 16-game season to 15. The games that were scheduled for the third week of the season were cancelled, and the games for weeks 4-6 were played with replacement players). Thus, Rice actually caught about 0.40 more TDs/game than Moss (about 1.83 vs 1.44). This certainly does not take away from Moss’ accomplishment, nor does it tell us that Rice was more valuable to the 49ers than Moss is to the Pats, or that Rice had the best receiving season ever and Moss had the second best—and this per/game analysis really doesn’t reveal anything new to us. However, it does remind us how great Jerry Rice was, and we can only wonder how many TDs he would have caught that year had he played 16 games. He won the Associated Press Offensive Player of the Year Award this season.

There’s a similar argument on the other end of the pass, and it seems to be a little more heated because it involves current players. Peyton Manning’s achieved his 2004-record 49 touchdown passes in the span of 15 games. His backup played most of the 16th game because it was irrelevant for playoff positioning.

After 15 games, Tom Brady had “only” 48 touchdown passes, one less than Manning at the same point of the season. Thus Peyton did average more touchdowns per game. So some, mostly Colts fans, will argue that Brady didn’t break Peyton’s record.

This is true as long as you change the record in question. Brady didn’t break Peyton’s record of “most touchdown passes in the first 15 games of a season” or “most touchdown passes per game”. But these aren’t records you’ll find in any books.

On the other hand, Peyton’s passer rating that year was 121.1 compared to Brady’s 117.2 this year. These are first and second all-time, and third-place is another four points down (Steve Young in 1994 had a 112.8).

See the NFL’s record book for passers and 2007 passing stats.

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Tags: statistics, football, hsac

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01.24.08

Joint Math Meetings roundup

Posted in Math at 8:59 pm by leingang

This month I was in beautiful San Diego for the annual Joint Meetings of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America. Now that my finals are over and (almost) graded, I can recap what happened there.

I assisted Holly Zullo, Mark Parker, Kelly Cline, and Derek Bruff (in absentia, but who had the whole idea in the first place!) in a minicourse on classroom voting technologies, otherwise known as “clickers.” We had a great time and our participants loved creating clicker questions for their classes.

I went to some of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education (RUME) contributed paper sessions. One of them I found thought-provoking was “The Effect of Grading Quizzes on Subsequent Student Performance” by John J. Schiller of Temple University. He compared student performance between sections of linear algebra in which students either got graded quizzes with comments, or graded quizzes with no comments, and he found little difference. Other research suggests that ungraded quizzes with comments might have a better effect on student performance than graded ones.

I attended several of the invited addresses, which are usually pretty good. Two of the more notable ones were “4000 years of algebra” by Karen Parshall of the University of Viriginia and “The Mathematics of PageRank” by Fan Chung of UCSD. The PageRank talk was not about how PageRank works (the known parts are a very nice linear algebra application), but about how effective it is. The ideal way to find pages of high PageRank involves finding eigenvectors of a matrix which has about 30 billion rows and columns–that’s 900 quintillion entries. Most of them are zero, but still, this is far beyond the capabilities of modern computers, which can handle matrices about a million square. So PageRank is an approximate solution, but (as Chung has proven mathematically, and Page and Brin have proven financially) a good one.

My favorite recurring session is “Who Wants to Be a Mathematician?” by Mike Breen of the AMS. He brings in area high school students to compete in a math game show for cash and prizes. This year the contestants had their own cheering sections, which added excitement. Breen is a great emcee, having learned from the best. He was on both Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! The difference between them, he says, is on Wheel they tell you when to jump up and down and clap.

I also took lots of photos, most of which were of boats, Mexican food, birds of paradise, or sunsets:

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Tags: sandiego, jmm, sotl, rume, sunset

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