Category: Updates

So far, this week is going better than last week. I did feel unwell for part of today, but I also finished the set of calculus exercises I had been working on and read part of the next section in my textbook. I’ve been hoping for a while to experiment with two study periods, one for calculus review and one more open-ended. That did not happen today but perhaps conditions will be favorable tomorrow or Wednesday.

Today I read the rest of the article on Penrose tilings that I mentioned, as well as more of A Short Account of the History of Mathematics. I’m feeling a little better, but I’ve decided to take tomorrow off blogging. I am very tired from all I’ve been dealing with this week, and I have a lot to do.

Today I finished listening to A Brief History of Mathematics. I also found and listened to an audio excerpt from the 1888 book A Short Account of the History of Mathematics by W. W. Rouse Ball. The recording was made to be used as a sleep aid and is designed to be soothing, which seemed appropriate. Finally, inspired by the Banach-Tarski video from yesterday, I spent some time thinking about the sizes of infinite sets. They weren’t very deep thoughts, but perhaps I will share them in the next few days.

Today I felt unwell both mentally and physically. Most of my study was listening to A Brief History of Mathematics, though I also read part of an article by Martin Gardner on Penrose tilings. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

I woke up fairly depressed this morning. I ended up staying in bed listening to A Brief History of Mathematics rather than getting up to work from my calc book, as I had the previous two days. Among other things, the section I listened to described the discoveries of the mathematician Georg Cantor, who may have been bipolar, too. At the least, he was repeatedly hospitalized for depression.

I am traveling home tomorrow, so I will be taking the day off study and blogging. Expect me back on Monday.

I did more calc reading and exercises this morning. I thought I might fit in a little study this afternoon, as well, but it was a full day by my standards, so that didn’t happen.

Hello from Elsewhere, readers. This morning I both read the section in my calculus text about calculators and computers and finished the exercises. My more powerful graphing program did not produce the interesting artifacts the book talked about, but I enjoyed using it to graph families of functions and see how changing one element of the equation affected the graph. Desmos has a special feature to facilitate this. Here’s an example.

I didn’t do much today because I was (I hope) recovering from a cold that hit me late on Saturday. As far as math goes, I only listened to some of A Brief History of Mathematics.

Also, I am going to take tomorrow off blogging because, if I have recovered enough, I will be driving to visit my mother. I am planning to study and blog while on that visit, though.

Things were better today. I finished the section of calculus exercises I have been working on. The next section is about graphing calculators and computers. I will be interested to see how applicable it is to the tools I have available now, nearly 20 years after this edition was published.

I had a pretty miserable day, for multiple reasons. I didn’t manage to do any exercises, but did watch some YouTube videos.