# Adding by a Form of 0: Index

I’m doing something that I should have done a long time ago: collecting a series of posts into one single post. The following links comprised my series on adding by a form of 0 (analogous to multiplying by a form of 1).

Part 1: Introduction.

Part 2: The Product and Quotient Rules from calculus.

Part 3: A formal mathematical proof from discrete mathematics regarding equality of sets.

Part 4: Further thoughts on adding by a form of 0 in the above proof.

# Sum of Three Cubes

I now have a new example of an existence proof to show my students.

Last year, mathematicians Andrew Booker and Andrew Sutherland found solutions to the following two equations: $x^3 + y^3 + z^3 = 33$ and $x^3 + y^3 + z^3 = 42$. The first was found by Booker alone; the latter was found by the collaboration of both mathematicians. These deceptively simple-looking equations were cracked with a lot of math and a lot of computational firepower. The solutions:

$(8,866,128,975,287,528)³ + (–8,778,405,442,862,239)³ + (–2,736,111,468,807,040)³ = 33$

$latex (–80,538,738,812,075,974)3 + 80,435,758,145,817,5153 + 12,602,123,297,335,6313 = 42$

At the time of this writing, that settles the existence of solutions of $x^3 + y^3 + z^3 = n$ for all positive integers $n$ less than 100. For now, the smallest value of $n$ for which the existence of a solution is not known is $n = 114$.

For further reference, including links to the original articles by Booker and then Booker and Sutherland, please see:

# Existence Proofs

Source: https://xkcd.com/1856/

# Borwein integrals

When teaching proofs, I always stress to my students that it’s not enough to do a few examples and then extrapolate, because it’s possible that the pattern might break down with a sufficiently large example. Here’s an example of this theme that I recently learned:

# My Favorite One-Liners: Part 108

In this series, I’m compiling some of the quips and one-liners that I’ll use with my students to hopefully make my lessons more memorable for them.

Today’s post marks the final entry in this series. When I first came up with the idea of listing some of favorite classroom quips, I thought that this series might last a couple dozen posts. To my surprise, it instead lasted for more than 100 posts. I guess that, in my 21-year teaching career, I’ve slowly developed my own unique lexicon for communicating mathematical ideas, and perhaps this parallels (on a decidedly smaller scale) what a radio talk show host (like local legend Randy Galloway, who was a sports reporter/commentator in the Dallas/Fort Worth area for many years before retiring) does to build rapport with his/her audience.

I’ll use this final one-liner near the end of the semester when it’s time for students complete their evaluations of my teaching. Back in days of yore, professors would take 10-15 minutes to pass out paper copies of these evaluations, students would complete them, and that would be the end of it. In modern times, however, paper evaluations have switched to electronic evaluations, which are perhaps better for the environment but tend to have a decidedly lower response rate than the old paper evaluations. Still, I value my students’ feedback. So I’ll tell them:

Please fill out the student evaluation; the size of my raise depends on this.

After the laughter settles down, I’ll tell them, “Who’s joking?” I can’t say this happens everywhere, but I can honestly say that my department’s executive committee does consider student evaluations of teaching when deciding on the quality of my teaching, and that partially determines the size of my annual merit raise. (The committee also considers other indicators of good teaching other than student evaluations.)

It’s important to note that I don’t tell my students to give me a good evaluation; I just ask them to fill it out and to be honest with their feedback. I also tell them, forgetting my raise, I also want to hear from them about how the semester went. If it went great, I want to know that. If it sucked, I also want to know that. However, if they think the class sucked, just writing “This class sucked” doesn’t give me a lot of information about how to fix things for the next time that I teach the course. So, if they have a criticism, I ask them to give me specific feedback so that I can consider their critiques.

A couple years ago, I served on my university’s committee for reconsidering the way that we conduct student evaluations of teaching. To my surprise, when I interviewed students in focus groups, there was a general consensus that students believed that their evaluations were a waste of time that didn’t actually contribute anything to the university — or if they did contribute something, they had no idea what it was. Ever since then, I’ve made a point of telling my students that their evaluations really do matter and can make a difference in future offerings of my courses.

# My Favorite One-Liners: Part 101

In this series, I’m compiling some of the quips and one-liners that I’ll use with my students to hopefully make my lessons more memorable for them.

I’ll use today’s one-liner when a choice has to be made between two different techniques of approximately equal difficulty. For example:

Calculate $\displaystyle \iint_R e^{-x-2y}$, where $R$ is the region $\{(x,y): 0 \le x \le y < \infty \}$

There are two reasonable options for calculating this double integral.

• Option #1: Integrate with respect to $x$ first:

$\int_0^\infty \int_0^y e^{-x-2y} dx dy$

• Option #2: Integrate with respect to $y$ first:

$\int_0^\infty \int_x^\infty e^{-x-2y} dy dx$

Both techniques require about the same amount of effort before getting the final answer. So which technique should we choose? Well, as the instructor, I realize that it really doesn’t matter, so I’ll throw it open for a student vote by asking my class:

After the class decides which technique to use, then we’ll set off on the adventure of computing the double integral.

This quip also works well when finding the volume of a solid of revolution. We teach our students two different techniques for finding such volumes: disks/washers and cylindrical shells. If it’s a toss-up as to which technique is best, I’ll let the class vote as to which technique to use before computing the volume.

# My Favorite One-Liners: Part 99

In this series, I’m compiling some of the quips and one-liners that I’ll use with my students to hopefully make my lessons more memorable for them.

Today’s quip is a light-hearted one-liner that I’ll use to lighten the mood when in the middle of a complex calculation, like the following limit problem from calculus:

Let $f(x) = 11-4x$. Find $\delta$ so that $|f(x) - 3| < \epsilon$ whenever $|x-2| < \delta$.

The solution of this problem requires isolating $x$ in the above inequality:

$|(11-4x) - 3| < \epsilon$

$|8-4x| < \epsilon$

$-\epsilon < 8 - 4x < \epsilon$

$-8-\epsilon < -4x < -8 + \epsilon$

At this point, the next step is dividing by $-4$. So, I’ll ask my class,

When we divide by $-4$, what happens to the crocodiles?

This usually gets the desired laugh out of the middle-school rule about how the insatiable “crocodiles” of an inequality always point to the larger quantity, leading to the next step:

$2 + \displaystyle \frac{\epsilon}{4} > x > 2 - \displaystyle \frac{\epsilon}{4}$,

so that

$\delta = \min \left( \left[ 2 + \displaystyle \frac{\epsilon}{4} \right] - 2, 2 - \left[2 - \displaystyle \frac{\epsilon}{4} \right] \right) = \displaystyle \frac{\epsilon}{4}$.

Formally completing the proof requires starting with $|x-2| < \displaystyle \frac{\epsilon}{4}$ and ending with $|f(x) - 3| < \epsilon$.

# My Favorite One-Liners: Part 98

In this series, I’m compiling some of the quips and one-liners that I’ll use with my students to hopefully make my lessons more memorable for them.

I’ll use today’s quip just after introducing the methodology of mathematical induction to my students:

Induction is so easy that even the army uses it.