Written by me
and available on the web
This page collects some links to stuff I wrote that is available
online. I've also written lots of book reviews, especially for the MAA Reviews (of which I am the
editor); those are not listed here.
Research and Expository
Was Cantor
Surprised?, appeared in the March 2011 issue of the American
Mathematical Monthly.
To celebrate Mathematics
Awareness Month 2008, I gave a talk at Colby on Mathematics
and Voting. The notes and slides are here.
Final form (January 2001) of
Where the Slopes
Are, a report on computations about the distribution of the
p-adic slopes of the U operator.
This paper has now appeared in the Journal of the Ramanujan
Mathematical Society — see my publications list for the exact reference.
Tables containing the
results of
the slope computations are also online.
Long ago I worked with Shai Simonson on a short article on How
to Read Mathematics. The article will become part of Shai's forthcoming
book, Rediscovering Mathematics (MAA). It was also reprinted in the
October 2010 issue of Hacker
Monthly.
General Public
Some time back the Los Angeles Times asked me to write an op-ed
piece on mathematics. Specifically, they wanted to know why mathematicians
bothered with such things as finding large Mersenne primes. The resulting
short article appeared in the LA Times and in several other
papers. You can read it here. Most of the
feedback I got was from other mathematicians, so I'm not sure whether this
actually was of any interest to the mythical "general public."
Course Materials
- MA177: In the Fall of 1997 I taught an intro-level
course on (some of) the mathematics of the eighteenth century. Many
of the course materials are
available online.
Fernando Q. Gouvêa ---- fqgouvea@colby.edu
Last modified: Mon Sep 06 10:16:25 -0400 2010