Jonathan Shock – Page 14

About Jonathan Shock

I'm a lecturer at the University of Cape Town in the department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics. I teach mathematics both at undergraduate and at honours levels and my research interests lie in the intersection of applied mathematics and many other areas of science, from biology and neuroscience to fundamental particle physics and psychology.

First year resources – part 1: Intro to first year mathematics

As mentioned in the previous post, I am writing a resource book for the first year course that I will be in charge of this year. I want to crowd-source ideas for this a little. By that I mean that I will put up a number of the sections that I’m writing, and I’m keen to know, from those who have been through the course whether you feel that there is anything wrong, or missing from this. It is hard to know for someone who has not been on the learning end of a course like this for a long time what makes for the most useful information.

The second reason for doing this is that I think that these thoughts can be used for a wide variety of courses, and so if anyone wants to take these resources and use them in other contexts, then I will be very happy for them to do so.…

By Jonathan Shock| January 26th, 2016|Courses, First year, MAM1000, Undergraduate|3 Comments

First year mathematics experience enhancement – a question for you!

I am coming to you today with questions. Well, questions based on some of my own ideas…

This year I will be not only teaching, but entirely in charge of the UCT first year mathematics for scientists courses, known as MAM1000W. I have a number of changes I plan on making, not so much to the syllabus, but to the extra activities associated with the course, in an attempt to make it as rich and deep a learning experience as I can.

The first step of this has been altering the structure of the resource book. The resource book is a PDF which will be sent to all first years taking the course. Historically, it contains a little about the course content, a bit about how your marks will be calculated, a bit about good practice in terms of how to work, and then the second half is filled with tutorial questions.…

By Jonathan Shock| January 25th, 2016|Courses, MAM1000|10 Comments

Create a MathLapse animation and win prizes from the IMAGINARY conference 2016

The following is taken from the IMAGINARY website.

A “MathLapse” (ML) is a new educational and artistic format, which highlights the link between mathematics and real-world phenomena. The name MathLapse is inspired by the timelapse-technique in physics: By re-scaling time, phenomena are visualized which we cannot directly observe.

A ML is short, simple, self-contained, creative and illustrates a single mathematical idea through true or virtual animated images. The content of ML is diverse. For example it can be a geometrical animation or a time-lapse, which go along with mathematical equations and concise explanations.

Everybody is invited to submit a MathLapse on the IMAGINARY platform. The jury will review all submissions and give prizes to the best MathLapses.

A first MathLapse-Festival will be organized at IC16, where the winners will be announced and their MathLapse movies will be screened. It is not necessary to participate at the IC16 conference.

Here is the trailer for the competition

Katzengold:

Primelapse:

See what you can come up with!…

By Jonathan Shock| January 12th, 2016|Competition|0 Comments

How much does a Dougie weigh on Jupiter?

I spent an evening with old friends just after Christmas. One of their sons is fascinated by Space, and always has great questions for me about it. This year he asked how much he would weigh on Jupiter. I admitted that I didn’t know the answer, but that a) It wasn’t a single number, as the surface of Jupiter (if one exists) is not very well understood and different heights in the atmosphere would give different weights and b) I would find out. It took a little Googling to find some information about the density profile of Jupiter, which includes information about Saturn too. The paper is the following, with abstract:

Taken from http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v520/n7546/full/nature14278.html

In this paper is the following pair of graphs:

Taken from http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v520/n7546/images/nature14278-sf4.jpg

Which is all we need to calculate how much Dougie weighs on Jupiter. In the lower plot we see two different models of the density of Jupiter at different heights.…

By Jonathan Shock| January 10th, 2016|Fun, Uncategorized|0 Comments

The Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics – a review

Disclaimer – I was sent a review copy of this book, upon request.

(Image taken from here).

A detailed review of a book like this is almost impossible, given both the range of topics, as well as the number of authors involved. However, I can attempt to give an overview of the feel and breadth of the book.

As can be seen from the table of contents, this is a book of absolutely vast scope, and such scope has both advantages and disadvantages. Its advantages are simply that it covers so many topics, that almost every aspect of applied mathematics that you could think of is included, from numerical techniques, to cell biology, from the theory of solitons to cosmology, from how to write a book for the general public to science in the media, from complex analysis to graph theory, and so many more areas besides. As such it is an amazing reference to give very useful leads to go into the world of research in applied mathematics.…

By Jonathan Shock| January 5th, 2016|Book reviews, Reviews|1 Comment

Use your machine learning powers to solve the stock market on numer.ai

Home-grown South African mathematics, statistics and computer science have come together to give us numer.ai, founded by Richard Craib. This site which has come up with a seemingly brilliant idea, allowing anyone free access to otherwise very expensive data, but in such an encrypted form that you don’t know what the data means, but its patterns are preserved. This data is stock market data which you can use to make predictions. The predictions on their own don’t mean anything, so you send these predictions back to numer.ai, and they can apply it to the unencrypted data and make purchases on the stock market based on the most accurate models on their test data.

It’s simple but brilliant. They give you something very expensive for free, and you give them something very valuable for free. The brightest minds in machine learning can then potentially earn big money which would be impossible if it weren’t for the beauty of homomorphic encryption.…

By Jonathan Shock| December 10th, 2015|Uncategorized|1 Comment

Elephant Delta Day 4 – Nouzha El Yacoubi from University Mohammed V Rabat, Morocco on The impact of mathematics on the Africa socioeconomic takeoff

Blogging from The Tenth Southern Hemisphere Conference on the Teaching and Learning of Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics

Information, knowledge, science and technology give real power and is more essential for wealth creation of nations than capital or land.

Freeman Dyson:

Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of Life, it is perhaps the greatest of God’s gifts. It is the mother of civilization, of Arts and of Sciences. Technology continues to grow to liberate mankind from the constraints of the past. The most revolutionary aspect of technology is its mobility.

Anybody can learn it. It jumps easily over barriers of race and language. And its mobility is still increasing.

The world is in perpetual change: Science, technology and media are converging.

The widening gap in the economy between the developed and developing countries is essentially a manifestation of science and technology. Within Africa this is clear.

South Korea’s investment in engineering graduates increased enormously from 1970-1990.…

By Jonathan Shock| November 27th, 2015|Conference, Elephant Delta 2015, Uncategorized|1 Comment

Elephant Delta day 4 – Fransonet Reyneke from University of Pretoria on First level statistics students’ performance in a large classroom environment under the magnifying glass

Blogging from The Tenth Southern Hemisphere Conference on the Teaching and Learning of Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics

Fransonet Ryneke from University of Pretoria

Over the last 10 years students in first year engineering have been in the 60-70% pass-rate bracket. Tried many interventions with little success.

New interventions:

Blended learning model
Student centred
Flipped classroom

If you want to innovate something, there must be a what, how and why!

What?:

APLIA Online homework system: 3 attempts to do homework.
Flipped classroom using APLIA as a pre-class assignment
MindTap and APLIA clickers

Just APLIA on its own didn’t make much difference, but APLIA with the flipped homework made a huge difference – a 12% increase.

A pre-class and a post-class assignment, youtube videos.

They write a clicker exam. Students answer all go into an excel file. The clicker seemed to make a difference in the final marks too.

How clear is this post?

…

By Jonathan Shock| November 27th, 2015|Conference, Elephant Delta 2015, Uncategorized|1 Comment

Elephant Delta day 4 – Prof João Frederico da Costa Azevedo Meyer from Universidade Estadual de Campinas on Mathematical Disciplines for Undergraduate (and Graduate) Mathematics and Statistics: Challenges for Cooperating and Operating with Social Needs

Blogging from The Tenth Southern Hemisphere Conference on the Teaching and Learning of Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics

Prof João Frederico da Costa Azevedo Meyer from Universidade Estadual de Campinas

Different points of view lead to different views. Talking from the point of view of an applied mathematician – this will lead to a particular biased applied mathematician’s point of view, a utilitarian point of view, as well as an environmental scientist’s point of view.

He speaks as a customer. His students need certain skills, knowledge, etc. He is the one who needs the results of mathematical education at technical schools and university activities.

A lot of abstraction leads to unrealistic ideas: Who cares about the trigonometric functions applied to a 30 degree angle?

Fenando Pessoa: The preacher of his own truths…

Do students share our enthusiasm with what is taught in the classroom?

In fact, do WE share any enthusiasm?…

By Jonathan Shock| November 27th, 2015|Conference, Elephant Delta 2015, Uncategorized|0 Comments

Elephant Delta Day 3 – Shirley Wagner-Welsh from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University on An Investigation into the Effect of Mathematics Self-Efficacy and Mathematics Anxiety on Mathematics Performance

At Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University Very diverse socio-economic circumstances, mostly non-native English speakers. 23 Different languages on campus.

Why this study? There has been a large issue of poor performance and lack of engagement in mathematics.

What can we do about this?

Possible issues:

Topics are introduced at a fast pace
Students may not have the necessary prerequisites
Independent learning is required

Two other issues:

Mathematics self-efficacy:

Self-efficacy is people’s judgements of their capabilities to organise and execute courses of action required to attain designated types of performance (Bandura 1986).

Mathematics self-efficacy affects performance.

This can tell us why students sometimes don’t put in the necessary effort. If a student DOES have a high level of mathematical self-efficacy they tend to work longer on problems.

There does seem to be a link between mathematics self-efficacy and gender: Higher in males (grade 10-12 and pre-service teachers – Malpass, O’Neil and Hocenar: Self‐regulation, goal orientation, self‐efficacy, worry, and high‐stakes math achievement for mathematically gifted high school students) – in another study this was not found.…

By Jonathan Shock| November 26th, 2015|Conference, Elephant Delta 2015, Uncategorized|0 Comments

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