Thiel College To Reinstate Men's and Women's Tennis Programs

After an interruption of several years, Thiel College is reinstating the men's and women's tennis program for the 2010-2011 academic year. The Tomcats will compete in the Presidents' Athletic Conference (NCAA Division III).

This is great news for tennis in Greenville, PA and Mercer County!

In the last couple of years, the tennis courts (6 of them) at Thiel College have been neglected with tattered and torn nets. The College is planning to resurface the courts in the near future.

The Tennis Teams at Greenville High School have benefited tremendously over the years by having the tennis facilities at Thiel College. I have coached many players who grew up playing on these courts. In fact, some of the best players in recent Mercer County history (including the current captain of the Mercyhurst College Men's Tennis Team) obtained an early love for the game of tennis in part due to these tennis courts. Access to tennis courts is crucial for the growth of the sport.

Math Is Not A Spectator Sport!

I often tell my students that "Math is not a spectator sport!"

From Screen Jelly and Blabberize:

http://www.screenjelly.com/watch/_XQ-yXeUGcc

Arthur Benjamin's formula for changing math education | Video on TED.com

Arthur Benjamin argues that the pinnacle of math education should not be calculus, but instead it should be statistics and probability. Check out the interesting video.

Arthur Benjamin's formula for changing math education | Video on TED.com

WolframAlpha - A Computational Knowledge Search Engine

A student at my school let me know about a computational search engine called WolframAlpha. The goals of this search engine are ambitiously laid out as follows:

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.
Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.
Wolfram|Alpha is an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come. With a world-class team and participation from top outside experts in countless fields, our goal is to create something that will stand as a major milestone of 21st century intellectual achievement.

The people at WolframAlpha are associated with Mathematica, a powerful math software package. I performed a search with WolframAlpha to have it compute the derivative of 2 + 6sin^2 (0.3t). It correctly gave me 3.6sin (0.3t)cos (0.3t). It also provided me with graphs of the derivative and other information.

This might be a great tool for math students.