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European Music Portfolio (EMP) – Maths: 'Sounding ways into mathematics' : teacher’s handbook
(2016)
Music and mathematics share an odd character: many people believe that they are not good at one or the other (or both). However, ‘I cannot sing’ or ‘I never understood mathematics’ will probably not keep them from having successful careers, and nor will it change the opinions others have about them.
The project ‘European Music Portfolio – Sounding Ways into Mathematics’ (EMP-Maths) aims towards a different understanding with regards to this character. Everyone can sing and make music, and everyone can do mathematics. Both topics are integral parts of our life and society. What needs to be improved is our ability to give students opportunities to like them.
This teacher’s handbook presents activities with different mathematical and musical content in order to offer teachers resources, ideas and examples. These activities are designed to be expandable, adaptable to different contexts, and adjustable to the needs of each teacher and their students. Furthermore, these activities are not just planned to be carried out individually; a teaching unit could be used to make sense of them, or they could even be developed in connection with each other.
Apart from this teacher’s handbook, the project provides a continuing professional development (CPD) course, a webpage (http://maths.emportfolio.eu) from which all materials can be downloaded, and an online collaboration platform. A general overview of related literature and research is available in separate documents. Additional teacher booklets provide related materials and a brief overview of the theoretical background, and are the basis for the CPD courses. The project ‘Sounding Ways into Mathematics’ is related to the EMP-Languages project ‘A Creative Way into Languages’ (http://emportfolio.eu/emp/).
This thesis exhibits skeins based on the Homfly polynomial and their relations to Schur functions. The closures of skein-theoretic idempotents of the Hecke algebra are shown to be specializations of Schur functions. This result is applied to the calculation of the Homfly polynomial of the decorated Hopf link. A closed formula for these Homfly polynomials is given. Furthermore, the specialization of the variables to roots of unity is considered. The techniques are skein theory on the one side, and the theory of symmetric functions in the formulation of Schur functions on the other side. Many previously known results have been proved here by only using skein theory and without using knowledge about quantum groups.
Epstein and Penner constructed in [EP88] the Euclidean decomposition of a non-compact hyperbolic n-manifold of finite volume for a choice of cusps, n >= 2. The manifold is cut along geodesic hyperplanes into hyperbolic ideal convex polyhedra. The intersection of the cusps with the Euclidean decomposition determined by them turns out to be rather simple as stated in Theorem 2.2. A dual decomposition resulting from the expansion of the cusps was already mentioned in [EP88]. These two dual hyperbolic decompositions of the manifold induce two dual decompositions in the Euclidean structure of the cusp sections. This observation leads in Theorems 5.1 and 5.2 to easily computable, necessary conditions for an arbitrary ideal polyhedral decomposition of the manifold to be a Euclidean decomposition.