@mathprofbob.bsky.social

Looking forward to co-leading a minicourse at MAA MathFest this August in Boston with Paul Zorn about an innovative course for UGs to prepare them for upper level math w/ complex theme. Lots of beautiful, useful, and empowering math content for students to chew on and enjoy. #MathEducation

At JMM 2026: great talk by Nick Trefethen yesterday (Gibbs lecture) -- truly beautiful and wonderfully accessible for non-experts to show fabulous work. Check out the survey paper on archiv.org.

Brand new issue of AMS Notices has cover and story from Mason math colleagues and a lovely history article from A. Rice. What a nice treat!

Just retired from George Mason University. I had the privilege of teaching many wonderful students, interacting with great colleagues and friends, and never losing my love of mathematics. So grateful. Figuring out what's next after book project.

Yesterday I posted final grades for university courses for what may be the last time. Felt weird. Figuring out how to be active in mathematics during retirement will be an interesting challenge. Book project will use up all of that for the short term, but beyond that it is not yet clear to me.

Looking forward to Calc 2 class tomorrow. Will attempt to get students to think more deeply about integration as averaging and tie it back to Fundamental Theorem on an interval. Sets up lots of further discussion on uses of integrals. #iTeachMaths

In my Intro to Advanced Math college course, we investigate and prove things about complex numbers and functions. Student answers to day 1 prompts makes we wonder what really happens before college regarding complex numbers. It seems to vary quite widely, even among US students.

This week my student inquiry was about complex deg. 1 rational functions mapping the upper halfplane onto itself. They decided which generators of the full group do this, using some nice thinking. Then we looked at the UHP version of Escher prints and worked out the hyperbolic metric. #iteachmath

I am reading student essays on some beautiful math. This is about ordinary primes that do or do not factor as Gaussian integers. They are tackling ideas about relaxing a problem, using fixed points of involutions, and how visuals communicate differently from formulas. In context. #iTeachMath