Kyle MacDonaldMud Street: A Meditation on Symbolic ActsI ran my second and final marathon yesterday. The first one was two years ago Tuesday, in my first year at McMaster. This time, as before…Nov 2, 2015Nov 2, 2015
Kyle MacDonaldInto the CurveThis is a prologue to several short pieces I intend to post in the weeks leading up to my twentieth birthday. Such a numerically clean date…May 24, 2015May 24, 2015
Kyle MacDonaldIf You Meet a Math Person, Kill HimA saying attributed to the Zen Master Rinzai goes, “If you meet the Buddha, kill him.” The rough idea is that any conception or imagined…May 8, 2015May 8, 2015
Kyle MacDonaldLook at that Dot: Finding Your Place in the Mathematical CosmosThere are good arguments — far from flawless but good nonetheless — for the basically bottom-up approach taken in North American…May 8, 2015May 8, 2015
Kyle MacDonaldWhat We Talk About When We Talk About Linear AlgebraLinear algebra is introduced in bits and pieces throughout high school, first with the solutions of linear systems and then with the…May 8, 2015May 8, 2015
Kyle MacDonaldWhy We Graph Functions: A Story of Cultural ExchangeThe ideas of functions and their graphs are so central to modern mathematics that many mathematicians, or at least mathematics students…May 7, 20151May 7, 20151
Kyle MacDonaldDawdling Grasshoppers and Exhausted Orbits: An Approximate History of CalculusThe popular story of calculus holds that it was invented independently by a German and an Englishman in the late 17th century in more or…May 6, 2015May 6, 2015
Kyle MacDonaldTrigometry, Polynomials, Logarithms, and Being Wrong on PurposeIn realistic mathematical inquiry, we almost never try to find exact answers to complicated quesions. Whether we are studying the whirring…May 4, 2015May 4, 2015
Kyle MacDonaldTrigonometry: OriginsStudents in math classes from middle school to university often wonder, or actually ask, a valid and important question: “Why should we…May 4, 2015May 4, 2015