Selected Articles

I’m proud of my writing. The most influential thing I’ve written was a book, Instructor’s Guide to Stewart’s Calculus, a free supplement for adopters of Stewart’s various calculus texts. According to the publisher, thousands of people are using the group activities and innovative lecture ideas in this book. The find the error problems that I share on this website are taken from this text. I’ve also co-authored a precalculus textbook with Tom Hungerford, which is sadly out of print.

Of course, I don’t only write books. I like to write about math, math education, and where they intersect. I also write about all sorts of other things. Here’s a sampling of some of my favorites.

Paul Erdos said of the 3n+1 problem: “Stop! Stop! Do not waste your time!” But I was bitten hard by the bug. This paper categorizes the natural numbers that do not appear in the Collatz orbits of smaller numbers.

Harris graphs are an interesting type of graph, but even more interesting is that they were discovered as a result of an IBL summer program. This paper tells the tale! (There’s an error in the appendix – can YOU find it?)

Currently, students are taught that complex numbers are what happened when you throw the square root of negative one into the real numbers and duck. Many math educators think this is the only way to think about complex numbers. It is not at all how engineers think about them, and this paper discusses the way that they do.

Every university has a “Math for People Who Would Rather Die” course. Can these courses be taught with Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) techniques? I’m very proud of what I do in UNI’s course, and proud of what TJ Hitchman does, so we wrote a paper about it!

This was originally published in a refereed literary journal, UNIversitas. It was reprinted in a different literary magazine. I’m linking to that version, because the design is much more pleasant.

BizEd is the primary journal for business education. This article is about the work I do with them to prepare UNI business majors for the challenges of communicating in today’s world.

This was published in the AIN Quarterly Journal, and I’m looking for a refereed journal to submit it to as well. I think the title is self-explanatory!