Written by me
and available online

This page collects some links to stuff I wrote that is available online. I've also written lots of book reviews, especially for the MAA Reviews (of which I am the editor); those are not listed here.

Pathways from the Past

When we finished the first edition of Math through the Ages, Bill Berlinghoff and I tried to put into practice our recommendation to use the history of mathematics in teaching. The result was two booklets called Pathways from the Past.

There are two volumes. Each contains historically-based worksheets that teachers can use to teach mathematics. Each set of worksheets comes with a 64-page teacher’s manual that provides historical background and some guidance on how to use this material in class. Amy Shell-Gellasch reviewed them in MAA Reviews.

There are two sets of worksheets. Pathways I focuses on Numbers, Numerals, and Arithmetic, while Pathways II is about Algebra. Both sets were originally published by Oxton House. Since they are no longer in business, we have decided to make these available online:

Download Pathways from the Past I.
Download Pathways from the Past II.

Research and Expository

Jonathan Webster and I are working on a historical book about “common inessential discriminant divisors” in the early years of algebraic number theory. For that project we translated and annotated papers by Dedekind and by Hensel. The links take you to those papers on arxiv.org.
Was Cantor Surprised?, appeared in the March 2011 issue of the American Mathematical Monthly.
To celebrate Mathematics Awareness Month 2008, I gave a talk at Colby on Mathematics and Voting. The notes and slides are here.
Final form (January 2001) of Where the Slopes Are, a report on computations about the distribution of the p-adic slopes of the U operator. This paper has now appeared in the Journal of the Ramanujan Mathematical Society — see my publications list for the exact reference.
Tables containing the results of the slope computations are also online.
Long ago I worked with Shai Simonson on a short article on How to Read Mathematics. The article will become part of Shai's forthcoming book, Rediscovering Mathematics (MAA). It was also reprinted in the October 2010 issue of Hacker Monthly.

General Public

Some time back the Los Angeles Times asked me to write an op-ed piece on mathematics. Specifically, they wanted to know why mathematicians bothered with such things as finding large Mersenne primes. The resulting short article appeared in the LA Times and in several other papers. You can read it here. Most of the feedback I got was from other mathematicians, so I'm not sure whether this actually was of any interest to the mythical "general public."

Course Materials

MA177: In the Fall of 1997 I taught an intro-level course on (some of) the mathematics of the eighteenth century. Many of the course materials are available online.

Fernando Q. Gouvêa ---- fqgouvea@colby.edu

Last modified: Mon Sep 06 10:16:25 -0400 2010

Written by me and available online

Pathways from the Past

Research and Expository

General Public

Course Materials

Written by me
and available online