Up and Running with MacTeX

With the release of TeX Live 2022 earlier this week, I decided this is a great time to describe how to install a full TeX Live distribution on Macs. I will also go further and describe how to maintain that distribution, keeping packages up to date. Sorry Windows users. I haven’t touched a Windows machine […]

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Conceptual Understanding in Introductory Physics XXXII: Practice With Simple Vector Comptuation

This question is a numerical version of the previous question. For a given arbitrary vector quantity , calculate the following quantities. Use a different vector quantity for each student, and have them do the calculations in a programming language in real time (like GlowScript) to demonstrate coding proficiency. Additionally, these calculations can be done very […]

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Almanacs in Astronomy Classes

In memory of my maternal grandmother Dorothy Marie Blalock Clark (1912-1997) TL;DR: Ubiquitous farmers’ almanacs are an inexpensive printed source of accurate astronomical information despite being mostly advertising vehicles. This information can be used in the classroom to generate questions and learning about not only astronomy, but also history, mathematics, and computation.  Thanks to my […]

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LaTeX: My Materials for Students

Beginning this semester, my physics (introductory calculus-based physics) class is using LaTeX for writing up solutions. Rather than installing TeX Live (MacTeX) on every machine, we’re using Overleaf because it seems to work on desktops, laptops, and tablets (at least as far as I can tell). I give students a ZIP file containing five files, […]

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