Latin squares: 9982437658213039871725064756920320000 permutations inside the box

A Latin square is an nxn grid of symbols in which each of n symbols appears once in each row and each column. We will discuss orthogonality, Cayley tables, and the analogy of Latin squares to the rook problem, and you will discover how Latin squares apply to tire rotation. What does the number in the title have to do with Latin squares? Come find out.

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Yup. That's my title and abstract for my upcoming talk at the Hudson River Undergraduate Math Conference, which will be held at Williams College on April 30. Sounds like fun. You should stop by; my talk is only 15 minutes long.

Different stimuli

QOTD:

We'll think about you and 5th dimensional and beyond bubbles while gazing out at the water and sailing off shore this summer. It's good that we all
get our highs from different stimuli. Go for it!

More on the context later.

Anchors Away

I have become the Webmaster for Anchors Away, the Williams anti-anchor-housing group. I put up a Web site for it yesterday evening, and it's already gotten 200 hits -- including hits from Indonesia, Japan, and Finland, though the vast majority is from Williams. See here:

http://wso.williams.edu/orgs/anchors-away

I am adding names to the list of opposed students as soon as they land in my inbox, and I am posting news within 15 minutes of hearing of it, so I hope that this will be a good resource. So go visit.

It looks pretty much like every other Diana Davis site, except that this time, it actually matters, kind of.

Free U HTML course: Final products

Over Winter Study, I taught a course on how to make a Web page. Now the course is over, and several of my students actually stuck it out to the end and made actual, functional Web pages. Here they are:

Jerry He '08
Delwar Hossain
Maksym Kepskyy
Lily Li '08
Irina Zhecheva '08

Some of these clearly show signs of the entertaining examples I used in class (the bright backgrounds, the cow...). But I think that they are really nice sites, and I hope that these students will continue to update them in the future.

Maksym (who spells his name many different ways) plans to make his site into an extreme sports page, so that people will come and read about different sports, and watch 10-second videos of them, and read short statements from people who do the sports about why they like them. He hopes that people will then decide to try out these sports on their own. He already has a sound introduction (in his native language) and a video on the site, which are very worth checking out.

Did anyone notice that no one called Smith or Johnson stuck it out to the end? Hmmmm. I had 19 students (over half were CDE students) for the first class. They all created nice pages, and then only five came back the next week to learn how to put them on the Internet. Hmmmmmmmm.