Stage One...
May. 5th, 2004 05:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowWell, I finished the first set of finals - 54 of them, from my calculus class. The other two classes are much smaller - twelve in differential geometry, four in abstract algebra - so they won't take nearly as long. So, I decided to call it a day; I'll finish the rest tomorrow. I was kind of disappointed in my calculus students; a lot of them did significantly worse on the final than they had on the midterms. On the other hand... There's one special thing I do in grading my classes. The finals are always comprehensive. For each midterm, there is a corresponding section of the final, covering the same material (although not with the same, or necessarily even similar, questions). If a student does better on one section of the final than s/he did on the midterm, I replace the midterm grade with the grade on that section of the final. (If s/he does worse, the midterm grade stands as is.) Even though the overall performance on the final was below that on the midterms, there were quite a few students who got one or more midterm grades boosted, in some cases spectacularly. (I got this idea from Teaching Tips, by Wilbert McKeachie. I should probably go back and reread that.)
I finished The Man Who Loved Only Numbers. It was interesting, although a bit depressing for a middle-aged professor with only a handful of publications to his credit. I was amused by one thing in particular. Paul Erdos was the most prolific mathematician of the last century - in fact, he published more than anyone since Leonhard Euler, back in the 18th century - and many of his papers were collaborations. From this fact arose the notion of an "Erdos number". Erdos himself had Erdos number 0; anyone who wrote a paper with him has Erdos number 1; and in general, if you co-wrote a paper with someone with Erdos number n, you have Erdos number n+1 (unless you can claim a lower number). The unfortunates who can't link to him have Erdos number infinity. (I think mine is finite, but I don't know what it is.) Anyway, among the people with Erdos number 1 is none other than Hammerin' Hank Aaron. It seems that Erdos and Aaron received honorary degrees from Emory University in the same year, and someone in the audience had them both autograph a baseball...
I've finished Fire Time, also, and started in on The Ornament of the World, a set of vignettes about al-Andalus. The author is a bit biased in favor of her subject - the preface, written by Harold Bloom, points this out - but still, the glories of Moorish Spain were certainly great enough to make that understandable. I haven't gotten very far yet, though.
I finished The Man Who Loved Only Numbers. It was interesting, although a bit depressing for a middle-aged professor with only a handful of publications to his credit. I was amused by one thing in particular. Paul Erdos was the most prolific mathematician of the last century - in fact, he published more than anyone since Leonhard Euler, back in the 18th century - and many of his papers were collaborations. From this fact arose the notion of an "Erdos number". Erdos himself had Erdos number 0; anyone who wrote a paper with him has Erdos number 1; and in general, if you co-wrote a paper with someone with Erdos number n, you have Erdos number n+1 (unless you can claim a lower number). The unfortunates who can't link to him have Erdos number infinity. (I think mine is finite, but I don't know what it is.) Anyway, among the people with Erdos number 1 is none other than Hammerin' Hank Aaron. It seems that Erdos and Aaron received honorary degrees from Emory University in the same year, and someone in the audience had them both autograph a baseball...
I've finished Fire Time, also, and started in on The Ornament of the World, a set of vignettes about al-Andalus. The author is a bit biased in favor of her subject - the preface, written by Harold Bloom, points this out - but still, the glories of Moorish Spain were certainly great enough to make that understandable. I haven't gotten very far yet, though.
