Cough cough cough...

Oh my.

I just need a few days off, is all, but when am I going to get them?

As the semester really starts to heat up (don't you love the fast pace of these last few weeks?), I up and decide to come down with the mother of all colds.

To my students: I apologize for the raspiness (and sometimes absence) of my voice, and for any perceived shortness of breath and of temper. If I seem frustrated, it's not with you, it's with my damned lungs. Too, I thank you in advance and retroactively for your patience and understanding, and for your help in ensuring that I only talk when needed, and then only as much as I need to to make my point.

So...what have we got to do to nail things down?

In calculus we'll be finishing up with a little bit more on curve sketching, a treatment of L'Hôpital's Rule, maybe a little Newton's Method. Y'know. Fun stuff. I'll be fitting in one more miniproject, a couple more quizzes, and one more exam, on Chapter 4, before the final wraps things up.

Only a few more days remain in Number Theory and 280; in each, I've got two more days to say my piece before I turn things over to the students. I'm excited about the presentations folks are putting together. In 368 we'll devote whole class periods to the Riemann zeta function and the Riemann hypothesis, to groups of arithmetic functions, to extended properties of Gaussian arithmetic, and to algebraic cryptography. In 280, folks are putting together 15-minute presentations on Ramsey theory, the Fibonacci sequence, Euler's identity, the cardinality of sets of subsets of the naturals, on Pythagorean triples, and so forth. I'm looking forward to it.

Meanwhile, on Sunday I've gotta drive a few hours to the north to James Madison U. to give another talk on detecting hyperbolicity using asymptotic connectivity, assuming I'm well enough.

Oh, the pizza man just drove up outside, I'd best be off for now.

Remind me to post again later on the idea that struck me while lying awake in a codeine-induced stupor last night: The Multimedia Menger Sponge Project. And about another (a 9th! horrors!) student pet peeve I thought of this afternoon. Not to be missed!