Steve Sigur's Webpages

Steve Sigur died Saturday, July 5. Funeral services were held Wednesday, July 9, 2008. To read Paideia School's headmaster Paul Bianchi’s eulogy, see a video interview with Steve and read a letter from headmaster Paul Bianchi to the Paideia community, click here.

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`I've been to a day-school, too,' said Alice; `you needn't be so proud as all that.'
...Said the Mock Turtle with a sigh. `I only took the regular course.'
`What was that?' inquired Alice.
`Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,' the Mock Turtle replied; `and then the different branches of Arithmetic -- Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.'

-- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Read Polya's Ten Commandments for Mathematics teachers, displayed on the right. I found these, not as a list, in his book Mathematical Discovery, which I recommend.

New ways of teaching geometry.
I think that students who do not do geometry well do not see it well. Here is a set of lessons built around what I call natural geometric structures. I am developing this all the time.

Seminar
This is the course where I am exempt from the school curriculum, so I teach my own, which involves doing whatever I think is interesting at the moment. This year I have been emphasizing estimating skills and statistical methods, particularly as they are used in computer graphics. These methods are implemented using Photoshop (remember that all computer programs are just big math packages) and Mathematica. Now we ae seeing how graphs and matrices relate.

Geometry
I spend most of my time with this, enough to have some thoughts about it.

Interesting Mathematics
This one is already fully operational. Lots of stuff about geometry and graphing, along with whatever else interested me at some time or other.

4D
Material developed by and for my course in the fourth dimension.