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Category Archives: Teaching
High Dimensional Expanders: Introduction I
Alex Lubotzky and I are running together a year long course at HU on High Dimensional Expanders. High dimensional expanders are simplical (and more general) cell complexes which generalize expander graphs. The course is taking place in Room 110 of the mathematics building on … Continue reading
Posted in Combinatorics, Teaching
4 Comments
In how many ways you can chose a committee of three students from a class of ten students?
The renewed interest in this old post, reminded me of a more recent event: Question: In how many ways you can chose a committee of three students from a class of ten students? My expected answer: which is 120. Alternative … Continue reading
Posted in Mathematics to the rescue, Riddles, Teaching
1 Comment
Test Your Intuition (11): Is it Rational to Insure a Toaster
Here is a question from last year’s exam in the course “Basic Ideas of Mathematics”: You buy a toaster for 200 NIS ($50) and you are offered one year of insurance for 24 NIS ($6). a) Is it … Continue reading
Posted in Probability, Rationality, Teaching, Test your intuition
Tagged Insurance, Test your intuition
18 Comments
The Beauty of Mathematics
This semester I am teaching an introductory course in mathematics for students in other departments. I taught a similar course last year entitled ”Basic Ideas in Mathematics,” and this year, following a suggestion of my wife, I changed the name to “The Beauty of Mathematics”. Another … Continue reading
Posted in Teaching
26 Comments
A Proof by Induction with a Difficulty
The time has come to prove that the number of edges in every finite tree is one less than the number of vertices (a tree is a connected graph with no cycle). The proof is by induction, but first you need … Continue reading
