Math, Literature, and Movies

Syllabus

Preposed Calendar for the Remainder of the Semester:

Tuesdays	Fridays
3/25: Man Who Knew Infinity & Journal Check	4/28: Man Who Knew Infinity
4/1: Basic Ciphers and Analysis	4/4: Vigenere and Jefferson Ciphers
4/8: Enigma Machine (https://archive.org/details/DecodingNaziSecrets, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/decoding/)	4/11: Finish watching the Enigma Documentary and maybe do some activities. Read scenes from Breaking the Code.
4/15: Codebreaker: The Story of Alan Turing & Journal Check	4/18: No Class
4/22: The Story of Wind and Mr. Ug and and Some Arts and Crafts Topology	4/25: Playing with dimensions
4/29: Flatland & Journal Check	5/2: No Class
5/6: Final Project Presentations	5/9: Final Project Presentations

Calendar:

There is a proposed calendar on the syllabus, but here I will record what we actually get through in class.

…
4/15: We watched the first hour and eight minutes of Codebreaker: The Story of Alan Turing
4/8 and 4/11: We watched the documentary Decoding Nazi Secrets and read scenes from Breaking the Code
4/4: Jefferson and Vigenere, Jefferson’s Cipher Wheel, Cipher Tools
4/1: We started looking at cryptography with the slide decks Basics and Definitions and Intro to Frequency Analysis. Then played with decrypting a sample cipher using given data.
3/28: We completed The Man Who Knew Infinity
3/25: The Man Who Knew Infinity (We’ll do the journal checks during the movie as before.)
3/14: Logic Day 4: Discovering the Art of Mathematics (Truth, Reasoning, Certainty, and Proof)
3/11: Logic Day 3: Discovering the Art of Mathematics (Truth, Reasoning, Certainty, and Proof)
3/7: Logic Day 2: Notes on Logic
3/4: Logic Day 1: Notes on Logic
2/28/2025 – We finished watching Agora and will start looking at logic next class.
2/25/2025: Today we watched the first hour of Agora (available on media.wcsu.edu, log on with your id). We will finish this on Friday and then next week we will Start studying logic and reading Logicomix. Please note that we are a day behind the calendar on the syllabus.
2/18/25 & 2/21/25: First, I apologize for the confusion in due dates, we will start the movie and I will do the journal check on Tuesday 2/25/25. Today we spent the class looking at the Moscow Papyrus problem 6 with the goal of using the English translation to try and figure out what the different hieroglyphics or groups of hieroglyphics represented much as scholars did with the Rosetta stone.
2/11/2025: Today we went through the slides on Number Systems. These look at a variety of ways of writing numerals from different cultures in history. We ended by taking time to understand how we could figure out how a number system works by looking for patterns. We will look more deeply at Egyptian mathematics next class when we look at the Rosetta Stone Exercise (Updated 2/10/2025).
2/7/2025: Today we discussed the gory details of the proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic. We also discussed the distinctions between definitions, common notions, axioms/postulates, lemmas, theorems/propositions, and corollaries. We ended class by using some of our lemmas to prove that \(x=\sqrt{2}\) is irrational and pointing out that the same proof works if 2 is replaced with any prime \(p\).
2/4/2025: We looked at the foundations, definitions, axioms, and propositions, we need to prove the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic. We will finish this off next time and discuss a little more number theory.
1/30/2025: Today we started talking about the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic. We practiced factoring numbers into prime factors and multiplying. We saw in particular that factoring is significantly harder than multiplying. This fact is significant because this is the basis for the security of the RSA encryption system.
1/28/2025: Today we talked about how ideas are built up from definitions and axioms into complex propositions. In particular we looked at this in Euclid’s Elements. You should finish up your diagrams from the Euclid Graph Assignment for next class.
1/24/2025: We discussed the syllabus and the structure of the class. Then we discussed why we study math. For Sophie’s Diary you should try and finish one chapter between classes, so try to finish chapter one before next class. I’ll post dates below.