PureGin.org

Just reblogging from teaching.puregin.org: I posted my slides and some other material from my OpenWeb Vancouver 2009 talk on “Open Books, Open Minds, Open Source”. This talk explored how the conception of “openness” in information and knowledge, in the context of teaching and learning mathematics, has changed over the past 2400 years of mathematics education.

In particular the timeline of Education and Technology technology which I made can be found here: http://www.puregin.org/exhibits/edtech/edtech.html

Today is Rememberance Day here in Canada, and I've been thinking about "war and war's alarms", to quote Yeats. One of the books I've been dipping into a lot lately is Thomas W.

Sixteen years ago, I started translating "FLP": A. Fathi, F. Laudenbach and V. Poénaru's notes (in French) from a Seminar on the work of Bill Thurston on surface diffeomorphisms, measured foliations, and hyperbolic geometry. At the time I thought it might take a couple of summers (this being a fundamental division of time in the life of a graduate student). Time passed, and many things got in the way, including a thesis, work, offers to star in Hollywood movies... well, OK, not the last. The project had been sitting on a back-burner since 1996, when a lovely summer in Montreal provided the perfect setting for a bout of translation work. I faithfully copied my files from an old Compaq 8086 portable, to a Sparc Classic LX, to a Sparc 20, to a Pentium II Linux machine, and finally to my current Apple Powerbook, never fully expecting that they would ever see the light of day again.