To Do for Wed, Feb 20

  • Please watch this Numberphile video (7 minutes). I decided not to spend time on greek constructions in class, but you should know a bit of the history and main idea, and this is a nicely done enjoyable video.
  • Please read your text, pages 78-85. You can just do a gentle read over the bit about constructible numbers (pages 78-80 and 85), without diving deeply; these are nice to know about but I won’t consider it a topic of the course. Focus on pages 81-84 as a complement to Monday’s lecture.
  • Log into canvas and complete the associated reading quiz there.
  • Here is a wonderful 3blue1brown video (15 minutes) that visualizes Pythagorean Triples. It is optional, but it’s highly recommended.
  • Wednesday we will cover pages 86-93. You may wish to read ahead on those.
  • I will likely assign Chapter 3, Exercises 2 and 3 on the next homework; you may wish to do them early to study for Friday’s quiz.