I am Associate Professor of Applied Science and Engineering at Olin College of Engineering and Visiting Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. I am interested in improving how we teach science, mathematics, and engineering.
I was once Associate Director at MIT's Teaching and Learning Laboratory.
I was also assistant professor in the physics department at the University of Cambridge, in David MacKay's Inference group; a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; and the first curriculum director of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cape Town, South Africa.
Here is a somewhat recent CV
.Book |
MIT Press published my textbook Street-Fighting Mathematics: The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving. It is also available from Amazon. Reviews of the book: News stories about the book or teaching the art of approximation: |
Courses |
6.055/2.038. Art of Approximation in Science and Engineering (MIT, Spring 2008, 2009, 2010) | OpenCourseWare site. 5.95/6.982/7.59/8.395/18.094. Teaching College-Level Science and Engineering (MIT, Spring 2009). 18.098/6.099. Street-Fighting Mathematics (MIT, IAP 2007, 2008, 2009) | OpenCourseWare site. 6.003. Signals and Systems (MIT, Fall 2007) 6.969. Readings in teaching (MIT, Fall 2006). |
Approximation materials |
Caltech order-of-magnitude-physics course materials from 1995 and 1997 (syllabi, problem and solution sets, exams, handouts) Examples of how to teach approximation Dissertation (US letter format) including one-half of a textbook on order-of-magnitude physics. The draft textbook is also available on its own. The MIT IAP course page has a more recent version. |
Science/math education |
Classic report on mathematics teaching by
Louis Benezet My papers on history of science and science teaching for the 2001 IHPST conference in Denver, Colorado. My observations on teaching first-year physics. Teaching survey: A study of physics teaching in Cambridge physics department. |
Computer Othello |
BILL: An Othello program released under the GPL. About 210KB. It was once one of the strongest Othello players in the world (but now far surpassed!). |
Other teaching materials |
At Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Teaching material used for IA (first-year) physics. Notes on relativity (spacetime diagrams) are here. |