A good friend of the Metroplex Math Circle, Dr. Arthur Benjamin, has just released a new lecture course through the Teaching Company titled “Discrete Mathematics.” We have our pre-ordered copy and its seems to have the unique combination of humor and depth that we know from Dr. Benjamin’s excellent “mathemagic” presentations.
For any students just starting with Math Circles, they will benefit greatly from becoming familiar with the topics on these DVDs: number theory, combinatorics and graph theory.
Here is the description of the course from the Teaching Company:
Welcome to Discrete Mathematics, a subject that is off the beaten track that most of us followed in school but that has vital applications in computer science, cryptography, engineering, and problem solving of all types.
Most of the mathematics taught after elementary school is aimed at preparing students for one subject—calculus, which is the mathematics of how things grow and change continuously, like waves in the water or clouds in the sky. Discrete mathematics, on the other hand, deals with quantities that can be broken into neat little pieces, like pixels on a computer screen, the letters or numbers in a password, or directions on how to drive from one place to another.
While continuous mathematics resembles an old-fashioned analog clock, whose second hand sweeps continuously across a dial, discrete mathematics is like a digital watch, whose numbers proceed one second at a time. As a result, discrete mathematics achieves fascinating mathematical results using relatively simple means, such as counting.
Explore this modern realm of digital math in Discrete Mathematics, 24 mind-expanding lectures by veteran Teaching Company Professor Arthur T. Benjamin, an award-winning educator and mathemagician who has designed a course that is mathematically rigorous and yet entertaining and accessible to anyone with a basic knowledge of high school algebra.
Posted by Metroplex Math Circle
Dr. Paul Stanford departed from our recent lectures on applied mathematics and contest preparation to give our students a glimpse into the fascinating world of pure mathematics. Dr. Stanford is particularly skilled at teaching deep ideas without the need to resort to complex algebra, I’ll attempt in this recap to do his lecture a small bit of justice.
Dr. Stanford further restricted the cases with the following rules: no two arrows can connect to the same point and no symmetry is allowed. These restrictions yielded only four possibilities including those with only a single point connecting back on itself and the possibility of having no points or arrows at all.
In the second half of the lecture, Dr. Stanford built upon this foundation as he introduced the 
Posted by Metroplex Math Circle
Posted by Metroplex Math Circle 





