Homepage | Mike Pierce

I’m a math instructor at Colorado Mesa University. This winter I won’t be regularly around my office, but you may contact me via email at .

If you’re around Grand Junction, you can find me Thursday mornings until about 10am at Copeka Coffee to chat about books, philosophy, politics, math, education, or whatever. A few things I’m reading and thinking about now …

Gaia’s Garden, by Toby Hemenway
Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter
An Age of Hyperabundance, by Laura Preston
The Aims of Education, by Alfred North Whitehead
Against Interpretation, by Susan Sontag

Digital Garden

How to Incorporate Mathematical Elements into Your Writing

Some advice to help students improve their mathematical writing.

Curated List of Internet Radio Streams

This is my list of Icecast/SHOUTcast/HLS/DASH internet radio stations. These streams can be played with mpd/ncmpcpp or VLC, or just through a web browser.

My Favorite Puzzle Questions

My collection of questions, typically classified as recreational mathematics or logic puzzles, that manage to engage students in a way the usual math curriculum does not.

Problem Solving (Putnam) Seminar

The William Lowell Putnam Mathematics Competition is an annual contest for US and Canadian undergraduate mathematicians. In this seminar we’ll be solving math problems in preparation.

Math Writing & Typography for MS Word

A writing sample and guide to typesetting mathematical writing and using some of the essential features of Microsoft’s WYSIWYG word-processing software.

Programming the Quadratic Formula into a TI-83/84+ Calculator

Once you know the quadratic formula, you can save time by programming it into your calculator once-and-for-all.

My Desmos Showcase

This is a collection of some of the novel demonstrations I’ve created in the Desmos Graphing Calculator for college algebra, calculus, etc. Please feel free to use these or build on them. Let me know if you expand anything here into something strictly cooler.