Professional Interests
topology
mathematics education
Twin Cities Math Teachers' Circle

Education
B.A. St. Olaf College
M.S., Ph.D. University of Minnesota

Recent Publications
The Mathematics of Helaman Ferguson's Four Canoes" by Loe and Borovsky in  Mathematics Magazine vol. 81, #3, June 2008.

Links to interesting math sites:

Brunnian links:  http://knotplot.com/brunnian/
   
COMAP:  http://www.comap.com/
   
Conway's Game of Life:  http://www.ibiblio.org/lifepatterns/
   
Geometry and Topology:  http://www.msp.warwick.ac.uk/gt/2007/11/
   
An Introduction to Symmetry: Teacher Resources:  http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~demo5337/s97a/teacher.html

Knots on the Web:  http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/knotlink.htm
   
MAA:  http://www.maa.org/
   
The Math Forum:  http://mathforum.org/
   
Mathematics ArXiv:  http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/
   
Venn Diagram Survey:  http://www.theory.cs.uvic.ca/%7Ecos/venn/VennEJC.html

Poems for Pi--March 14 is Pi Day

Various poems and phrases have been employed to encode the decimal expansion of pi. Below are two poems that encode the digits of pi to 14 and 31 digits respectively. Simply count the number of letters in each word of the poem. For example the words in the phrase How I love pi! have three, one, four, and two letters each; while the decimal expansion of pi to the nearest thousandth is 3.142.

A Short Poem
(14 digits)

How I wish I could recollect
of circle round
the exact relation
Archimede? unwound.

   
A Longer Poem
(31 digits)

Sir, I send a rhyme excelling
In sacred truth and rigid spelling.
 Numerical sprites elucidate for me
 The lexicons full weight.
 If Nature gain,
 Who can complain,
 Tho' Dr. Johnson fulminate?

The two poems above appeared in the magazine Omni in the mid-seventies.
If you know the source of these poems, please send e-mail.

The great mathematician's name is misspelled. It's Archimedes.

Pi to 101 digits
3.14159 26535 89793 23846
26433 83279 50288 41971
69399 37510 58209 74944
59230 78164 06286 20899
86280 34825 34211 70680
   

Links to Other Pi Sites

These links were found by searching on the phrase "How I wish I could recollect" at Google.
 
Mnemonics for Numbers has a couple of lines of Pi poems and phrases
 
La page de Pi (yes, it's in French)- consists of general information about p along with several poems in French, German, and English. The longest (in French) gives Pi to 127 digits!
 
The Pi Webring- a site that has links to 17 Pi web pages and 10 general interest math pages.
 
A Tribute to Pi- has a good chronology of Pi (in English this time).