Category Archives: Cool Ideas

A Creativity Conference Triggered These Thoughts 

Posted on June 2, 2023 by jrh794

The sessions at the fifth annual Creativity Conference at Southern Oregon University triggered the following perceptions and ideas.  I will strive to cite specific presenters, when possible, given my, at times, nearly illegible notes.  In general:    The sudden ascension … Continue reading →

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ChatGPT Can Answer Calculus Essay Questions

Posted on February 14, 2023 by jrh794

In a previous post, I gave an example of calculus essay questions that could be used to separate testing for understanding (The “why” of the steps) from testing for skills (The “how” of the steps). Here we will see what … Continue reading →

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Dirichlet Distribution in 4D

Posted on May 19, 2022 by jrh794

I use a four parameter Dirichlet distribution for my Rubrics as Data explorations. I “knew” that its behavior would be “similar” to the three parameters distributions shown in my last post, but I wanted a visualization. A 3D simplex is … Continue reading →

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Word Clouds – Revisited with OpenAI Codex

Posted on October 25, 2021 by jrh794

I was given the ability to experiment with OpenAI Codex – an engine that provides python and other programming language code given simple English instructions. My first experiment was to construct a word cloud from all the posts on this … Continue reading →

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The Original Hamiltonian Cycle – Continued

Posted on April 1, 2021 by jrh794

My latest discovery as I played with my wooden dodecahedron (read here for context) was a cycle that when repeated just once starting at the same vertex with a different edge covered all thirty edges. By the reasoning in the … Continue reading →

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The Original Hamiltonian Cycle

Posted on January 25, 2021 by jrh794

William Rowan Hamilton of quaterion and “the Hamiltonian” fame also has his name attached to a graph theory object call the Hamiltonian cycle or circuit. Think of a road map. Your object is to visit each city on the map … Continue reading →

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Creativity Conference II – What Inspired Me

Posted on July 18, 2019 by jrh794

I was inspired  by the smart, sensitive and, yes, creative presenters at our second Creativity Conference here at Southern Oregon University.  Last year I listed what I had learned.  This year I will list what stirred me to action. Art, … Continue reading →

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Changing the Limits of Integration

Posted on May 14, 2019 by jrh794

It is possible to change the limits of a definite integral to any limits you want by using a linear u-substitution.  To go from the integral from a to b to the integral from a’ to b’, use a u-substitution of u = mx + … Continue reading →

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Machine Learning – So, Explain Yourself

Posted on March 7, 2019 by jrh794

We humans are not giving up without a fight. Though computers are clearly outthinking us, see AlphaGo for example, we aren’t listening.  Cynthia Rudin, my latest hero, describes the issue in this video. Humans need reasons. In the paper, A … Continue reading →

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An Optimization Excursion

Posted on February 19, 2019 by jrh794

A student, Emily Wimmer, walked into my office.  She was trying to make sense of an optimization algorithm.  We worked it out and off she went to write a MATLAB program to test the algorithm on a well-behaved function. Of … Continue reading →

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