St. Bonaventure University

Mathematical Resources


Please direct reports of broken links to Dr. Chris Hill.

St. Bonaventure Resources


  • The Mathematics Suite (De La Roche 301) contains resources on mathematical careers, graduate school, and problem solving, and houses numerous math texts and journals. The suite is also a comfortable place to study or relax next to the math professors' offices.
  • Career and Professional Readiness Center 
  • Friedsam Memorial Library 
  • MathSciNet  (for St. Bonaventure users only)
  • Computer Science Department
  • The Learning Center  The Learning Center offers walk-in labs and individual tutoring, all free, for several (mostly 100-level) mathematics courses. The Center is located on the first floor of Plassmann Hall.

Art



Blogs, E-zines, & YouTube Channels


  • 3Blue1Brown  This YouTube channel by Grant Sanderson is "some combination of math and entertainment, depending on your disposition. The goal is for explanations to be driven by animations and for difficult problems to be made simple with changes in perspective."
  • AMS Feature Column  These essays are designed for those who have already discovered the joys of mathematics as well as for those who are curious about its promise. Each column spotlights math that is useful, fun, inspiring, or startling.
  • Math in the Media  A survey of math in the news, courtesy of the AMS.
  • Mathologer  Professor Burkard Polster invites you to "Enter the world of the Mathologer for really accessible explanations of hard and beautiful math(s)."
  • Numberphile  This YouTube channel by Brady Haran is filled with accessible, entertaining, and informative videos about numbers.
  • Quanta Magazine  A superb free online magazine dedicated to illuminating math and science research.
  • Terence Tao's Math Blog Updates on Tao's research and expository papers, discussion of open problems, and other math-related topics. Tao is one of the world's greatest mathematicians and is exceptionally articulate and generous with his insights.

Computing and Graphing



Culture



Data


  • U.S. and World Population Clocks The U.S. Census Bureau provides real-time estimates for the U.S. and world populations. The Census Bureau also provides every U.S. decennial census from the first in 1790 to the most recent.
  • How the world went from 170 million people to 7.3 billion, in one map  This amazing map animation, created by WorldPopulationHistory.org, shows the growth of humanity over the last 2000 years compressed into three and a half minutes. In the video, the map animation starts at about 1:18 and ends at about 4:48.
  • U.S. National Debt Clock This site displays an estimate of the national debt and a wealth of related figures at the second you visit it. The Treasury Department provides daily estimates for the national debt for any business day since 3/31/05 (and monthly or yearly estimates even further back).
  • Bank Failures The first graph on this page from the CalculatedRiskBlog displays the number of FDIC-insured bank and thrift failures by year from 1934 to 2017. The economic woes of 2008 and 2009 may lead one to expect that the number of bank failures in these years were the highest since the Great Depression. But as this graph shows, the numbers of bank failures during the S&L crisis of the '80s and '90s were much higher.
  • United States Presidential Elections Maintained by the Federal Register, this site includes electoral and popular vote tallies for every presidential election, from the first in 1789 to the most recent.
  • List of World Records in Athletics This Wikipedia page and its linked pages provide IAAF-sanctioned world records in track and field, road running, and racewalking for men and women.
  • Internet Host Count The Internet Systems Consortium provides survey data for the number of Internet hosts from August 1981 through the present year. The number of hosts effectively measures the size of the Internet. Watch the number of hosts grow from 213 in 1981 to over one billion in 2017.

Data Science


Data Science seeks to draw useful information from large data sets, be they numerical, textual, or visual. It is an amalgam of statistical and machine learning, of data mining and data visualization techniques.

The Harvard Business Review asserts that data scientist will be the sexiest job of the twenty-first century. McKinsey & Company predict a shortage of 175,000 big data professionals by the year 2018.

Applications of data science include...

Curious? Here are a few excellent resources.


Geometry


  • Platonic Solids in All Dimensions  In two dimensions, there are infinitely many regular polygons. In three dimensions, there are just five regular polyhedra, also known as Platonic solids. What happens in four dimensions? Five? Six?
  • Scissors Congruence  An interactive demonstration of the Wallace–Bolyai–Gerwien Theorem. You draw two simple polygons, and the website shows how they are equidecomposable.
  • Wine Bottle Theorem  A surprising result about stacking circles, discovered with wine bottles.

History



Meta-Sites



Number Theory


  • The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences  Founded by Neil Sloane, this database is an incredible resource for professional and amateur mathematicians and anyone who enjoys numbers. The site can be searched by leading terms, name, or keyword. Each sequence may be experienced visually (as a graph) or aurally (as music). The database contains over 300,000 entries.
  • Numberphile This YouTube channel by Brady Haran is filled with accessible, entertaining, and informative videos about numbers.
  • The Prime Pages Prime number research, records, and resources.
  • Pi Day Our Pi Day page includes resources about the amazing number pi and about the day of celebration named for it.
  • What's Special About This Number? Part of the Archimedes Laboratory Project, these pages provide a wealth of interesting facts about many numbers. Caution: Some assertions on these pages are false. (E.g., "The question whether 'zero' is odd or even seems to be totally subjective!" For the record, zero is definitely even, because it's twice an integer.)

Probability and Statistics


  • Buffon Needle Problem George Reese's discussion of the classic problem in probability, which includes a Java applet for simulating the underlying experiment.
  • FiveThirtyEight  provides data and statistical analyses in politics, economics, and sports. The site was created by Nate Silver, who is the current editor.

Problem Solving



Projects



Puzzles and Games


  • Mind-Reading Trick This site appears to read your mind... How does it do it? (The trick is based on some elementary number theory.)
  • Interactive Games & Puzzles
  • Ed Pegg Jr.'s Math Games A column written for MAA Online (the web site for the Mathematical Association of America). Ed is also the webmaster for MathPuzzle.com.
  • MathPuzzle.com An extraordinary collection of mathematical puzzles and links to more mathematical puzzles, maintained by Ed Pegg Jr.
  • Ken's Puzzle Links A list of web pages, compiled by Ken Duisenberg, that pose (mostly) mathematical problems for anyone to solve.

Shopping


  • Cafepress.com  Math tee-shirts, mugs, and more.
  • Maths Gear  Mathematical curiosities, including puzzles, games, and apparel, often relating to math videos by Steve Mould, Matt Parker, and James Grime. Based in the United Kingdom (hence "maths").
  • M.C. Escher Collection  The definitive source for posters, t-shirts, puzzles, calendars, and other items decorated with the art of M.C. Escher.
  • Zazzle.com  Math tee-shirts, mugs, and more.

Teaching



Typing Mathematics


  • Typing Mathematics: LaTeX This page addresses issues commonly faced by students (particularly St. Bonaventure students) who are writing papers or giving presentations with substantial mathematical content.

Visualization


  • The Math Images Project is a collection of images in the Swarthmore College website that illustrate and illuminate certain mathematical concepts. Images are accompanied by discussions of the mathematics underlying them.