Partially Ordered Thoughts

I know I’m not the first person to blog about course evaluations (ProfHacker has at least three posts alone), and recently I’ve seen a few articles discussing campuses considering moving to online course evaluations and potential pitfalls, particularly in the area of response rates. (See for instance, Wired Campus writing on the topic.) This semester I had tremendous success in getting my students to complete the online Georgia Tech Course/Instructor Opinion Survey (CIOS), and this post shares some of my thoughts on the matter. Read more »

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day that honors the contributions of women to the fields of science and technology. Today, bloggers from around the globe will write (or podcast, draw a comic, etc.) about many women across generations. More information can be found at findingada.com. Although I’m a mathematician, I’ll leave blogging about the many contributions of women in mathematics to others today. Instead, I’d like to write about a pioneering woman in engineering at Georgia Tech to salute my friends who have followed in her footsteps. Read more »

Last week, on a beautiful Friday afternoon before Spring Break, I was teaching my applied combinatorics students about generating functions. We’ll see some of the more powerful things next week, but last week we were focused on the number of integer solutions to an equation in a small number of variables. This is a recurring problem in our class: first we saw it with binomial coefficients, then we saw it with inclusion-exclusion, and now we’re seeing it with generating functions. To make the material less abstract, we were discussing the question in terms of fruit baskets. (You want to make a fruit basket with apples, oranges, bananas, and peaches in it. The number of apples must be even, there must be at least two oranges, there can be no more than six bananas, etc.) Read more »

As readers may know, I’ve been selected as a Marshall Sherfield Fellow. In September, I’ll leave for London, where I’ll spend 21 months as a visiting fellow in the Department of Mathematics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. This necessitates obtaining a Tier 5 visa for entry into the United Kingdom. Tier 5 encompasses all sorts of temporary workers, but in my case it’s the Government Authorised Exchange category, designed to promote sponsored research that brings foreigners to the UK. I’ve not found the UK Border Agency‘s information to be the clearest, but it’s not impossible to navigate. Unfortunately, it appears that my bank is trying to make it impossible to provide the necessary documentation. Along the way, I’ve had fun with a Wachovia staffer who seems to not understand the difference between “average” and “minimum.” Read more »