The University of Chicago is not known for its athletics, so when I entered it as a first-year student I was very surprised that I had to take and pass a swimming test. Despite my parent’s best efforts, I had never learned to swim, and thus had to take a required quarter of swimming classes. …
Math Blaster was the biggest hit educational product in the 1980’s, the first decade of the personal computer age. Flying saucer like objects would vaporize before your eyes when you solved a simple math question. It thus gave you immediate feedback and like pinball, it kept score. My friend Jan Davidson designed and built this …
One hundred years ago my father at age 9 entered America. He had traveled from his birthplace in a town in what is now Ukraine across the vast expanse of Siberia on the Trans-Siberian railroad to its eastern extreme at Vladivostok, from there by ship to Kyoto, Japan and then 6 weeks on a tramp …
On this 10th anniversary of the iPhone it is worth remembering that this invention, as world-changing as it was, will not be deemed the most important one of that decade. It will, in the long thrust of history, take second place to an event that truly and profoundly changes the course of human thought. For …
November 17-19, 2017, Barnard College, NY. Scientific Reasoning and QR in the Digital Age Introducing our new Tour of mathematics and problem solving in the digital age.
