In 100 reasons why lists are stupid, Tom Harrison explains that the smallest interesting number is 4.  I presume he is only considering natural numbers.  But even there, I think he’s wrong.  1 is interesting since it is the smallest natural number.  2 is interesting since it is the only even prime.  3 is interesting [...]

Blind Date [via MaplePrimes]

Tom Harrison in his blog Monday Evening was kind enough to recognize a second grade teacher and me for our accomplishments in our mathematics courses. I enjoyed Linear Algebra very much, which is a good thing since if I am accepted to UIS, my minor will be mathematics, and for that I will be [...]

I’m unhappy that I only got 86% on the final. But at least that’s enough to get an A for the course.
If I am accepted to the degree program I’m applying for, I’ll have to take an upper division Linear Algebra course. The course I just took should prepare me well for it; [...]

As long as I score at least 66.4%, I’ll have an A for the course.
Professor Sekhon said that he considered giving an open-book test, but chose not to do so. Instead, he will let us refer to the sample final he gave out on Monday for our practice, and will let us write our [...]

I think I aced today’s Linear Algebra exam, covering the chapters on inner product spaces and linear transformations, and part of the chapter on eigenvalues and eigenvectors. I didn’t have trouble with any of the problems, even the proofs. Though after class another student asked me about one question, and now I think [...]

I didn’t do as well as I’d have liked to on today’s Linear Algebra exam. There were 19 problems (originally 20, but the professor dropped one because it was on material we haven’t yet covered). I’m pretty sure I missed at least 3 and part of a fourth, so I’ll be lucky to [...]

Professor Sekhon decided that too many students did poorly on quiz 9 (on vector space basis), so he decided to drop it from the grading, and didn’t finish scoring everyone’s quiz. He did grade my, and I missed two problems out of 12, which is what I expected because those last two were proofs [...]

On the first Linear Algebra exam, I lost two points for an arithmetic error on one problem, and five points for completely misreading another problem. I read the problem as involving the sum of two matrices being equal to a third matrix, while it was actually about the determinants of the matrices. The [...]

Actually it is fun, though a bit tedious. My HP-49G+ calculator, or Mathematica or Maple on my laptop, can of course determine Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors automatically, but the point of today’s Linear Algebra class (and Monday’s quiz) is to learn how to do it ourselves.
Computing an matrix of cofactors (and its transpose, the adjoint) [...]