Mike Raugh Michael (dot) Raugh (at sign) gmail (dot) com Short Professional Bio

New News

Here is a recent paper on geometry motivated by observation of tendrils that grow on a California native plant known to hikers in coastal chaparral as "California Manroot".

Old News

I prepared two lectures based on my recollection of talks by Ray Redheffer in the 1950s. The first lecture was given on March 28, 2009 as the fourth invited talk at the LACC High School Math Contest, an annual event made possible by the dedicated voluntary efforts of the Los Angeles City College Math Department. You will see from clues in the lectures why Ray's talks were easy to remember: Lecture 1 (pdf) is about pi, and Lecture 2 (pdf) is about e. There is a challenge for high-school calculus students in each lecture.

This is the third summer (four days in April 2009) I have served as an instructor at the LACES Calculus Camp (pdf), the inspired creation of Robert Vriesman, Chairman of the Math Department at the LACES magnet school in Los Angeles. It's hard to believe that one hundred and thirty students from one public school would voluntarily (at personal cost) study calculus for four intensive days in preparation for advanced placement exams---but they did and had a great time doing it.

On March 8, 2008, I gave the third invited talk at the LACC High School Math Contest, How do you know what time it is: The Difference between clock time and solar time. The slide show, with additional text for explanation, is now available here (pdf).

I summarized RIPS and the management tools I use as RIPS director in a slide presentation (pdf) shown during the panel Starting and maintaining a student industrial research progam in the mathematical sciences at the MAA's MathFest August 4, 2007 in San Jose, California.

In 2006, fifty years after winning the Los Angeles City College Highschool Math Contest (then known as the William B. Orange Mathematics Competition), I was invited to give a presentation at the contest and talked about eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Invited again in 2007, I gave a talk entitled Mathematical Misnomers: Hey, who really discovered that theorem! (pdf). I drew the talk from work I had done in reconsidering the consequences of Kepler's Laws, starting from scratch. After deriving the inverse-square law and how it (in turn) implies Kepler's laws, I looked to see how the results were discovered originally. That's when I found many of the surprising things I put in the talk. Here are my notes on Kepler's Elliptical Orbits of the Planets and Newton's Inverse-square Law of Gravitation (pdf).

Ray Redheffer remembered 2005

I knew Ray from the time I was fifteen years old. My memories are those of a grateful friend from early years. For a professional profile of Ray by his colleague Theodore Gamelin, see the perspective from UCLA, where he taught for 55 years and published over 200 mathematical papers.

Some pictures for friends.