Sanjoy Mahajan

Sanjoy Mahajan 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

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Book

Cover of Street-Fighting Mathematics 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:
   by Prof. John Regehr at the University of Utah  |  BoingBoing

News stories about the book or teaching the art of approximation:
   MIT News |  Toronto Star |  Chronicle of Higher Education |  Here and Now (NPR) [last segment of the show]

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).

8.298. Lies and Damn Lies (MIT, IAP 2006)

IB Thermodynamics (Cambridge, 2004)

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, about an experiment done 70 years ago in Manchester, New Hampshire.

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.


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Last modified: Thu Feb 27 11:00:15 EST 2014