Math for six-year-olds

Today I went into my daughter’s first-grade classroom, full of six-year-old girls, and gave a presentation about Möbius bands.

We cut strips of paper and at first curled them into simple bands, cylinders, which we proved had two sides by coloring them one color on the outside and another color on the inside.  Next, we cut strips and curled them around, but added a twist, to make a true Möbius band.

A Möbius band

These, of course, have only one side, a fact that the children proved by coloring it one color all the way around. And we observed that a Möbius band has only one edge.

A Möbius-like band, with two twists

We explored what happens with two twists, or more twists, and also what happens when you cut a Möbius band down the center, all the way around.

Möbius band cut down the center

It is very interesting to cut a Möbius band on a line that is one-third of the way in from an edge, all the way around. What happens? Make your prediction before unraveling the pieces–how many pieces will there be? Will they be all the same size? How many twists will they have?

Overall, the whole presentation was a lot of fun. The girls were extremely curious about everything, and experimented with additional twists and additional ways of cutting.  It seemed to be just the right amount of mathematical thinking, cutting and coloring for a first-grade class.  To be sure, without prompting the girls made various Möbius earrings, headbands and bracelets, which I had to admit were fairly cool. One girl asked, “is this really mathematics?”

It seems I may be back in the first-grade classroom this spring, and I have in mind to teach them all how to beat their parents at Nim.

Student talks on infinitary computability

Students in my Infinitary Computability course will give talks on their term papers.  Talks will be held at the CUNY Graduate Center, Room 3307, 9:30-11:30.

Monday, December 3rd

• Miha Habič will speak on ”Cardinal-Recognizing Infinite Time Turing Machines”, in which he develops the theory of infinite time Turing machines that are given information about when they have reached cardinal time.
• Erin Carmody will speak on “Non-deterministic infinite time Turing machines”, in which she develops the theory of non-deterministic ITTM computation.
• Alexy Nikolaev will speak on “Equivalence of ITTMs, and their simultation on a finite time computer,” in which we proves the equivalence of various formalizations of ITTMs.

Monday, December 10th

• Manuel Alves will speak on infinite time computable model theory.
• Syed Ali Ahmed will speak on the relation between Büchi automata and infinite time Turing machines, including $\omega$-regular languages and generalizations to longer transfinite strings.

A course in infinitary computability, Fall 2012, CUNY Graduate Center, CSC 85020

In Fall 2012 I will teach a graduate course on infinitary computability theory in the Computer Science program at the CUNY Graduate Center.   This course will be aimed at graduate students in computer science and mathematics who are interested in infinitary computational processes.

Infinitary computability, CSC 85020, Mondays, 9:30 – 11:30 am
CS course listings | this listing

This course will explore all the various infinitary theories of computability, including infinite time Turing machines, Blum-Shub-Smale computability, Büchi automata, ordinal register machines and others. The focus will be on introducing the computability models and comparing them to each other and to standard concepts of computability. In the early part of the course, we shall review the standard finitary computational models, before investigating the infinitary supertask analogues.

Students wishing to prepare for the course should review their understanding of Turing machines and the other theoretical machine models of computation.

Philosophy of set theory, Fall 2011, NYU PH GA 1180

I taught a course in Fall 2011 at NYU entitled Topics in Logic: set theory and the philosophy of set theory, aimed at graduate students in philosophy and others who want to gain greater understanding of some of the set-theoretic topics central to work in the philosophy of set theory.  The course began with a review of the mathematical ideas, including a presentation of large cardinals, strong axioms of infinity and their associated elementary embeddings of the universe, and forcing, emphasizing the connection with the Boolean ultrapower and Boolean-valued models, but discussing the alternative formalizations. The second part of the course covers some of the philosophical literature, including what it means to accept or believe mathematical axioms, whether mathematics needs new axioms, the criteria one might use when adopting new axioms, and the question of pluralism and categoricity in set theory.

Here is a partial list of our readings:

1. Mathematical background.

2.  Penelope Maddy, “Believing the axioms”, in two parts.  JSL vols. 52 and 53. Part 1Part 2

3. Chris Freiling, ”Axioms of Symmetry: throwing darts at the real number line,”
JSL, vol. 51.   http://www.jstor.org/stable/2273955

4. W. N. Reinhardt, “Remarks on reflection principles, large cardinals, and elementary embeddings,” Proceedings of Symposia in Pure Mathematics, Vol 13, Part II, 1974, pp. 189-205.

5. Donald Martin, “Multiple universes of sets and indeterminate truth values,” Topoi 20, 5–16, 2001.

6. Hartry Field, “Which undecidable mathematical sentences have determinate truth values,” as reprinted in his book Truth and the Absence of Fact, Oxford University Press, 2001.

7. A brief selection from Marc Balaguer, Platonism and Anti-Platonism in Mathematics, Oxford University Press, 1998, describing the plenitudinous Platonism position.

8. Daniel Isaacson, “The reality of mathematics and the case of set theory,” 2007.

9. J. D. Hamkins, “The set-theoretic multiverse,” to appear in the Review of Symbolic Logic.

10.  Solomon Feferman, Does mathematics need new axioms? Text of an invited AMS-MAA joint meeting, San Diego, January, 1997.

11. Solomon Feferman, Is the continuum hypothesis a definite mathematical problem? Draft article for the Exploring the Frontiers of Independence lecture series at Harvard University, October, 2011.

12. Peter Koellner, Feferman On the Indefiniteness of CH, a commentary on Feferman’s EFI article.

13. Interpretability of theories, the interpretability degrees and Orey sentences in set theory and arithmetic.  Some of the basic material is found in Per Lindström’s book Aspects of Incompleteness, available at  http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.lnl/1235416274, particularly chapter 6, and some later chapters.

14. Haim Gaifman, “On ontology and realism in mathematics,” to appear in the Review of Symbolic Logic (special issue connected with the NYU philosophy of mathematics conference 2009).

15. Saharon Shelah, “Logical dreams,”  Bulletin of the AMS, 40(20):203–228, 2003. (Pre-publication version available at:http://arxiv.org/abs/math.LO/0211398)

16.  For mathematical/philosophical amusement, Philip Welch and Leon Horsten, “The aftermath.”

It’s been a great semester!