# SageTeX: Derivatives problems

I've added two more problems to the SageTeX: Derivatives page. One problem for finding the derivative of a logarithm (with Chain Rule) and one problem for the derivative of an exponential (with Chain Rule). Taking the derivative of logarithms with Sage is a bit problematic: the output of the derivative of a natural logarithm prints out as a common logarithm, so I've limited the scope of the problems to make sure the output is typeset correctly.

A link has been added to the sidebar for the CTAN mail archives. This is where you can see the new packages being added to LaTeX as well as package updates. Take a look and you'll find sesamanuel, a fresh addition to CTAN which, "....could be used to compose a stu­dent's class­room book...". This looks like a great addition but unfortunately the documentation is only in French.

Here are some issues which caught my eye:

• HuffPost tells us that mathematician John Urschel, "...The 6-foot-3, 308-pound offensive guard [who] absolutely loves math..." has come out with a paper "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fielder Vector of Graph Laplacians.”. You can find his explanation at Forbes along with a link to the paper.
• DailyHerald is out front on the latest emerging issue: "A New Jersey student's tweet about a question on new Common Core tests was deleted after it was flagged by a testing company, spurring a national debate about how to balance children's privacy with test security in the age of social media.". Monitoring of social media is "widespread" and "commonplace" on a variety of tests. "It used to be that all students across a state took a paper-and-pencil test on the same day or days. Now children are taking the same Common Core tests in multiple states during a period lasting longer than a month. That has created a more intense test-security problem for K-12 standardized exams: If a student from New Jersey reveals questions via Twitter -- or even just the name of a poem that appears on the exam to test reading comprehension -- it could give an advantage to students in New Mexico who are still preparing to take the test."
3. Nancie Atwell, a public school teacher in Maine, has won $1,000,000 for the Global Teacher Prize (considered the "Nobel prize of teaching"). Her advice for the future generation is to avoid public schools: ""Honestly, right now, I encourage them to look in the private sector," she said during an appearance on "New Day." "Public school teachers are so constrained right now by the Common Core Standards and the tests that are developed to monitor what teachers are doing with them. It's a movement that's turned teachers into technicians, not reflective practitioners." "If you're a creative, smart young person," she continued, "I don't think this is the time to go into teaching."". 4. Science Daily reports, "A 60-year old maths problem first put forward by Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi has finally been solved." 5. Computer glitches in Wisconsin delay Common Core exams, "On Thursday, officials from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction said they would delay the testing window for the new Badger Exam because the online delivery platform is not yet reliable. That means about 375,000 children originally scheduled to take the online tests in English and mathematics between Monday and May 22 will now take the tests between April 13 and May 22." 6. Yahoo News reports, "Two Maryland high school students have been accused of using Twitter to cheat on Common Core state standardized tests, officials said on Monday." 7. Yet again, The Atlantic, has another good piece. "Does Students Motivation Even Matter?" which is "...pell-mell of counterintuitive findings that call into question many of the widely held tropes about what works in boosting student learning...". # LaTeX: Plot template with spy Over the last week I found myself working on graphics for calculus (arc length and linearization) which required learning a bit about the spy capabilities of tikz. Spy allows you to magnify a part of your picture which is useful when you're dealing with small changes as is typical in calculus. After creating said graphics it seemed only appropriate that I create a plot template which uses spy. I've worked the capability into the previous plot template for consistent plotting graphics; you can see the output above. That's for illustrative purposes only; in my opinion there's too much happening in the picture above: so many functions, the grid and the spy area, and the vertical line. Recall that changing the "grid" option from "both" to "none" will turn off the graph paper. The new template is posted on the Handouts page, under the first template. Here are some issues that caught my eye recently: • A NY school district is apologizing after letting a student recite the Pledge of Allegiance in Arabic during National Foreign Language Week. Fury follows and the article mentions a tweet: "State Education Department regulations specifically say the Pledge of Allegiance should be read in English.". • Illinois Watchdog reports "After working one day as a substitute teacher in Illinois, David Piccioli could be entitled to an annual pension of more than$30,000." This story is attracting attention and is well worth reading.
• Chessbase hosts John Stewart's piece on U.S. buying (chess playing) nerds. No offense Fabiano!
• RT reports on over 1,000 arrested in a mass cheating scandal. Watch the video of them scaling walls to position themselves by windows to help out. The article notes,"More than 1,000 people were detained, half of them were parents and teachers while the other half consisted of friends and relatives," Gupteshwar Pandey, a police official in Bihar state, told AFP on Sunday. "Fifty percent have been released but I believe that the others are still probably in jail." followed by "According to Pandey, at least two policemen were also arrested and 10 more were dismissed after being implicated in the scam." and "Numerous photos and a video presented earlier this week showed the students using smuggled crib sheets, which friends and relatives had handed to students after climbing the walls of examination centers." You have to see it to believe it.

# March 20, 2015: Odds and Ends

• I've added code for plotting the upper Riemann and upper Riemann sums using sagetex. You can find them on the Plotting with Sagetex page, in the Riemann sums section.
• The problem: "Find a function whose domain is the positive real numbers and whose range is the integers." has been added to the Problems page.
• Infowars hosts the CBS news video on a student who was tased, arrested, and "...charged with assault on an officer, and two misdemeanors."
• In the last post there was an article on the poor performance of American Millennials compared with the rest of the world. ZeroHedge hosts  a more in-depth piece by Michael Snyder: "It's Official: Americans R Stoopid". From the article: "In Japan, Finland and the Netherlands, young adults with only a high school degree scored on par with American Millennials holding four-year college degrees, the report said." and reference stats from a USA today article on college students, showing,"-“Students also spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago”-“35% of students report spending five or fewer hours per week studying alone.” “50% said they never took a class in a typical semester where they wrote more than 20 pages”, “32% never took a course in a typical semester where they read more than 40 pages per week.”. Sobering.
• TheConversation reports on the roll of Twitter in the Common Core debates and studies the content of a large selection of Tweets: "There are upwards of 40,000 tweets using #commoncore each month right up to the present."

# Sagetex: Derivative 5/6 without the Chain Rule

I've added two more problems (Problems 5 and 6) to the Sagetex: Derivatives page. Problem 5 requires the student to calculate the derivative of a product of polynomials using the Product Rule. Problem 6 looks like a Quotient Rule but the derivative is more easily calculated by carrying out division before taking the derivative.

Here are some stories which caught my eye:

• L.A. Times reports 9 students at Venice High School were arrested and 14 accused, "...in connection with a series of sex crimes that began more than a year ago and involved at least two female classmates. All but one of the arrests were on campus; authorities were attempting to locate five other students." No doubt this story will continue to evolve.
• Mathematically challenged: it could cost you your marriage. The New York Post reports "Bride Walks out on groom after he botches simple math problem". In a country of arranged marriages, it was a sign to the bride she had been "misled" about his education. "“The groom’s family kept us in the dark about his poor education,” said Mohar Singh, the bride’s father. “Even a first-grader can answer this.”"
• LaTeX Community has a nice piece on "Why I like the TikZ Math library".
• Welcome to school today: a student intentionally runs into a school security officer "..in what has been described as an attempt to ‘chest bump’ the officer...". This knocks the officer to the ground. The officer gets up, grabs the boy and according to Infowars, which has the video posted: "The video shows Hardin lifting the 13-year-old child into the air with a chokehold. The child kicks and flails around before becoming limp and lifeless. Hardin then drops the student to the ground, resulting in what a doctor has described as “an injury to the brain” due to loss of blood flow.". Be aware of the graphic nature before you watch this.
• It's obvious to "older" people that school quality has dropped dramatically over the years (think Calculus students who struggle with fractions) but at least the students of today are tech-savy, right? According to this Fortune article, no. "American Millennials are among the world's least skilled" reports that a new study shows, "...Millennials in the U.S. fall short when it comes to the skills employers want most: literacy (including the ability to follow simple instructions), practical math, and — hold on to your hat — a category called “problem-solving in technology-rich environments.” Not only do Gen Y Americans lag far behind their overseas peers by every measure, but they even score lower than other age groups of Americans."

# Python/Sage: Finding roots with Newton's Method

An earlier post dealt with a fractal that resulted from Newton's Method. Today I've posted some Python code for finding the root of a function using Newton's Method on the Python/Sage page. Copy and paste the code into a Sage Cell Server, change the function to what you want and set the number, N, of iterations. It's quicker than using the calculator, less prone to mistakes, and shows the estimates of roots along the way (which is especially useful in cases where Newton's Method fails to find a root).

Here are some stories which caught my eye:

• Over 1,000 people turned out in Long Island to rally against Common Core. Long Island Press has the coverage.
• edSurge explains "Why the Smarter Balanced Common Core Math Test is Fatally Flawed".
• South Carolina has abandoned Common Core.
• In the last post I mentioned Saturday is Super Pi day because 3/14/15 matches up with 3.1415. But as this article points out, "in 2015, Pi Day really is significant as the mathematical moment of Pi–3.141592653–will only come around once in a lifetime, on March 14th, 2015 at 9:26 a.m. and 53 seconds....A moment like this won’t be back for another hundred years, March 14th, 2115.". Get your geek on!
• The Guardian has an article "Confessions of a mathematical Olympian: an insider view of film X+Y", which opens this weekend.
• The Daily Signal has a good piece on the growing concern over the Common Core standards. "A Pioneer Institute report coauthored by Milgram detailed that, by seventh grade, Common Core mathematics standards leave American students two grade levels behind their peers internationally and do not prepare them for admission into highly selective four-year universities and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) programs....And recently, reports surfaced that the Common Core architects left what some consider holes in the standards. Richard A. Askey, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and former member of the math standards’ feedback group, later noticed an omission of a geometry standard in Common Core. In fact, according to Education Week, Askey said “the process toward the end was so hurried that an entire high school standard was left out of the final draft.”"

# Graphics: Hyperbolic Trig Functions

The latest change is the addition of the hyperbolic trig functions to the Graphics page. The graphs were created using the Tikz plot template posted earlier. Therefore, I've posted just the PDFs and not the (.tex) file.

Here are some current events that caught my eye recently:

• The AMS Blogs has Part 1 of a piece on the Mathematical Education of Teachers. Finally someone I can agree with!

# LaTeX: lapdf package

I was hunting around the CTAN site recently and I came across the lapdf package which, according to the CTAN site, "...pro­vides the means to use PDF draw­ing prim­i­tives to pro­duce high qual­ity, col­ored graph­ics". A search of TeX StackExchange resulted in 0 uses. Since the package documentation is from 2011 it appears that the package isn't being developed anymore. I was unable to get a response from the package author, either. The documentation is a little weak, but if you download the contents of the package, there are numerous examples covering many topics:

• parametric curves
• polynomials, derivatives, and tangents
• integral and rational Bezier curves
• polar functions
• super-ellipses
• trig functions, inverse trig functions, hyperbolas, hyperbolic functions, log and exponential functions, power and root functions, and more
• turtle graphics

and more. The weak documentation means you have to be willing to puzzle your way through by looking at the examples. One of the jarring errors in the documentation is that examples are given with the line

\usepackage{Lapdf}

which is incorrect. It should be \usepackage{lapdf} to compile properly. I liked the fact that ellipses could be defined by specifying the center along with the major and minor axis lengths, and the rotation; that's done in the line

\Ellipse(50)(1,2)(3,2,30)

Which means 50 line segments were used in creating an ellipse centered at (1,2) with a=3, b=2, and a rotation of 30 degrees. Unfortunately, drawing the major and minor axes seems to be done by hand off on the side: if you look closely, the axes don't go through the proper vertices. So why not use sagetex and let Sage do the calculations? Now, in general, you can't trust that a package will work with sagetex; however, it seems as if lapdf does.

I've designed the code so that by specifying the center, major axis length, minor axis length, and rotation angle, the picture plotting parameters will be set and the ellipse, its center and its axes will be drawn. The code (shown above) has been added to the Plotting with SageTex page along with a version providing comments.

Here are some things that caught my eye recently:

• HippoCampus.org has educational resources for middle school to college. With respect to math, the "higher level" courses of trigonometry, calculus (I, II, III), differential equations, and linear algebra can be found here. Click on "Textbook Correlations" to display topics aligned to specific math texts(!). I've added the HippoCampus link to the sidebar.
• RT reports on a 16 year old who hacked into school computers to change his grades.
• The DailyPilot has a piece on Common Core materials with numerous math errors frustrating the teachers. From the article: "Earlier this month, at the district's request, a panel of 11 teachers began performing what administrators describe as "edits" to the Swun materials, placing teachers in the uncommon position of fixing the contractor's mistakes. But the remedy frustrates the head of the teacher's union. "We already paid for this. We should not have to fix something we already paid for," Kimberly Claytor, president of the Newport-Mesa Federation of Teachers, said after a school board meeting earlier this month."". Almost 2 million was spent on the new materials(!)
• Stanford math professor and author Keith Devlin is pushing video games to help students pick up the rules of math without getting bogged down in the symbols. Standard Examiner has the story here.