Daina Taimina

Cornell University | CU · Department of Mathematics

Most national curricula for both primary and secondary grades encourage the active involvement of learners through the manipulation of materials (either concrete models or dynamic instruments). This trend is rooted in the emphasis given, at the dawn of ICMI, to what might be called an experimental approach: the links between mathematics, natural sc...

What geometrician or arithmetician could fail to take pleasure in the symmetries, correspondences, and principles of order observed in visible things? Consider, even, the case of pictures: those seeing by the bodily sense the products of the art of painting do not see the one thing in the one only way; they are deeply stirred by recognizing in the...

If you have a collection of straight sticks that are pinned (hinged) to one another, then you can say you have a linkage like in the windshield wipers in your car or in some desk lamps. Linkages can also be robot arms. It is possible that our own arms caused people to start to think about the use of linkages. In this paper I will discuss how linkag...

School mathematics reflects the wider aspect of mathematics as a cultural activity. From the philosophical point of view, mathematics must be seen as a human activity both done within individual cultures and also standing outside any particular one. From the interdisciplinary point of view, students find their understanding both of mathematics and...

The complexity of quantum query algorithms computing Boolean functions is strongly related to the degree of the algebraic polynomial representing this Boolean function. There are two related difficult open problems. First, Boolean functions are sought for which the complexity of exact quantum query algorithms is essentially less than the complexity...

The complexity of quantum query algorithms computing Boolean functions is strongly related to the degree of the algebraic polynomial representing this Boolean function. There are two related difficult open problems. First, Boolean functions are sought for which the complexity of exact quantum query algorithms is essentially less than the complexity...

Most people judge the size of cities simply from their circumference. So that when one says that Megalopolis is fifty stades in contour and Sparta forty-eight, but that Sparta is twice as large as Megalopolis, what is said seems unbelievable to them. And when in order to puzzle them even more, one tells them that a city or camp with the circumferen...

Usually when we talk about using technology in teaching we think about it as something that has been developed in 20th century. Kinematic mechanisms were a technology used in teaching in 19th century. They were designed based on mathematical ideas and used for teaching and the invention of numerous practical machines. Later they were forgotten. Dur...

We consider k-tape 1-way alternating finite automata (k-tape lafa). We say that an alternating automaton accepts a language L \(\subseteq\)(Σ*)k with f(n)-bounded maximal (respectively, minimal) leaf-size if arbitrary (respectively, at least one) accepting tree for any (w 1, w 2,..., w k) ∈ L has no more than $$f\mathop {(\max }\limits_{1 \leqslant...

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