A Random Walk Through Experimental Mathematics

Abstract

We describe our adventures in creating a new first-year course in Experimental Mathematics that uses active learning. We used a stateof-the-art facility, called The Western Active Learning Space, and got the students to 'drive the spaceship' (at least a little bit). This paper describes some of our techniques for pedagogy, some of the vignettes of experimental mathematics that we used, and some of the outcomes. EYSC was a student in the simultaneously-taught senior sister course "Open Problems in Experimental Mathematics" the first time it was taught and an unofficial co-instructor the second time. Jon Borwein attended the Project Presentation Day (the second time) and gave thoughtful feedback to each student. This paper is dedicated to his memory.

Chaos Game Representation

“…In the first-year course we gave in 2015 [6], we applied the chaos game representation to mathematical sequences found on the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS) [14]. In the following, we show some CGR experiments that came from the first-year course.…”