The Aperiodical 

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That which we call an identity

By Andrew Stacey. Posted November 27, 2019

I’m grateful to Jemma Sherwood and Rob Low for reading an early draft of this and for their comments thereon. All opinions are, of course, my own.

This post is inspired by something that I see crop up now and again in discussions with other Maths teachers. It usually manifests itself as a rallying cry to use ≡ in place of = in identities and reserve = for equations. My standard response is to mutter something about identities being equations and leave it at that. But in the latest round, Jemma Sherwood challenged me, in the nicest possible way, to explain a bit further. This is that explanation.

Although I’m going to state my case here, I’m well aware that there are different opinions. In matters of opinion, such as this, agreement and disagreement is less important than that all sides think. So if what I write seems to you wrong, that’s fine so long as it makes you think about why you think that it is wrong.

What is a mathematician?

By Katie Steckles. Posted April 22, 2012

I recently got a new set of business cards printed. I wanted to keep them as simple as possible, and have them communicate only the important information – my name and contact details. But then came the question of what to put underneath my name. I don’t currently have a full time job anywhere, but I do spend pretty much all my time working freelance as a maths communicator, talking to people about maths and popularising the subject. I also do loads of maths related things in my spare time, including running a Maths Jam, and I’m still in the process of writing a paper based on the work I did in my PhD thesis, which I finished last summer. How do you sum that up? I recall recently our own Peter Rowlett struggled similarly when filling in the corresponding field on his census form.