Maybe My Next Book Should Be About Atheist Gatherings

As you have probably guessed from the blog drought around here, it’s the end of the semester. That means tons of grading, office hours, meetings with students, deadlines to meet, and all around not much time for blogging. Final exams are this week. Once those are graded I reach the promised land of summer break.…

Euler’s Solution to the Basel Problem

I’m in the mood for some math today, so here’s an amusing little proof I recently showed to my History of Mathematics class. We shall derive the formula $\frac{\pi^2}{6}=1+\frac{1}{4}+\frac{1}{9}+\frac{1}{16}+\frac{1}{25}+\dots$ Note that the denominators of the fractions on the right are all perfect squares. The problem of evaluating the sum on the right has…

Some Very Cool Card Magic

I recently attended the Gathering for Gardner conference in Atlanta, held every two years to honor Martin Gardner. Gardner was a prolific writer on a variety of topics, especially mathematics, magic and pseudoscience. Since those just happen to be three major interests of mine, you can imagine how much fun I had! Alas, since we…