Chris Stephens

Mathematician and math department chair.

[Chris Stephens @dcstephens]

@ImightBeCryo Ficken

[Chris Stephens @dcstephens]

@littmath I mostly get the one described in this thread where class has been going on for months and I’ve forgotten to teach it. But once I got one where I showed up on day 1 and it was English instead of math and I didn’t realize, and also there was another faculty there to observe me.

[Chris Stephens @dcstephens]

@dsavitt @littmath @Michael32376082 This is mine too.

[Chris Stephens @dcstephens]

@quanderon @littmath I have one particular finger I use a lot when doing math.

Also my mental math strategies don’t resemble the standard algorithms at all. Mental math is much closer to “common core” thinking

[Chris Stephens @dcstephens]

@littmath @TweetN4ABeatN Iirc JP Serre has a book called “a horse in arithmetic”

[Chris Stephens @dcstephens]

@littmath @TweetN4ABeatN Definitely proposing a graduate course in horse logic now. Is this what my grandmother meant by “horse sense”?

[Chris Stephens @dcstephens]

@IneffectiveMath

[Chris Stephens @dcstephens]

@littmath I tried to explain Lie groups to a class of graduate students this spring, but (and here’s where we likely went wrong) they were seated the whole time.

[Chris Stephens @dcstephens]

@littmath To be fair, they do have multiple required classes on actual literacy, so that problem has at least been recognized.

[Chris Stephens @dcstephens]

@IneffectiveMath @JeffVeillette Hockey isn’t real

[Chris Stephens @dcstephens]

@no_earthquake @looseolive Not sure I’m willing to engage in this sort of problem without Monty

[Chris Stephens @dcstephens]

@takemitsuronin @charlesmurray Yes

[Chris Stephens @dcstephens]

@matthematician @trans_versality I think the trick of “subtract finite balls and check for connectivity” only works because punctured R1 is disconnected. Eg, in R3, even the union of the xy-plane and the xz-plane stays connected upon deletion of B(0,R).

[Chris Stephens @dcstephens]

@matthematician Maybe more along topology lines, then? Something like “in every <caveat> neighborhood of the <asymptote thing> there is a point of <approaching thing>, with the caveat being that the radius of the nbhd depends on, uh, how far along the asymptote we are??

[Chris Stephens @dcstephens]

@matthematician From a certain perspective, vertical and horizontal asymptotes aren’t even qualitatively similar. VA act like force fields (functions “can’t cross them), while HA act like magnets (functions are “drawn to them”).

[Chris Stephens @dcstephens]

@IneffectiveMath Spoiler: despite not anticipating this question, Micah was able to display said Rinne charts within ~15 seconds.

This was a fun day for MTSU math!

[Chris Stephens @dcstephens]

@SCSNSH @IneffectiveMath All such are welcome! Also the MTSU math department will remain in your backyard after Micah leaves! Please reach out, we would love to build relationships with local math teachers at any level

[Chris Stephens @dcstephens]

@BryanBastin @IneffectiveMath Sure, from the MTSU math department, for whatever that’s worth

[Chris Stephens @dcstephens]

@GrpTheoretical The word “clopen”

[Chris Stephens @dcstephens]

@littmath Back to Daniel’s point, though, one great thing about the simple proof is (a) if it extends to the hard case, I (the listener) already have now learned the flavor of the hard proof; but (b) if it doesn’t, then I’ve learned the *need* for the hard proof, which is also interesting