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Useful Links

I will add more links to this page as the semester progresses. If you find a site that you think should be included, let me know and (if I agree!) I will put it up.


Here are two online modular arithmetic calculators:

and here is a gcd calculator.


  • Here is the Wikipedia page on public key cryptography.
  • Our Marden lecturer mentioned two mathematicians especially during his talk: the “Most Famous” codebreaker, Alan Turing, and the “Best” codebreaker, William (Bill) Tutte. (These are both links to Wikipedia.) At the bottom of the Turing page, you can see references to several books and movies about his life and work, if you want to learn more about his story. Apart from his codebreaking work during the Second World War, he is probably most famous for having invented the “Turing Test”, sometimes called the “Imitation game”, as a possible criterion for deciding whether or not a machine (for example, a computer) can be judged to be intelligent. His name is also attached to the concept of a “Turing machine”: a simple abstract model of a computer that is, in principle, capable of performing any computation if given the right program. When Turing came up with this idea, modern electronic computers had not yet been invented. but every electronic computer to date is really nothing more than a fancy Turing machine.

  • There are several lists of prime numbers available on the Internet. This page lists all primes less than 1 million.
  • Given lists like the one in the previous link, you might ask, “How many prime numbers are there?” In fact, there are infinitely many prime numbers. This is one of the most famous, and perhaps most beautiful, proofs in mathematics. It was known to Euclid, almost two thousand years ago.

  • In June 2010, Wisconsin adopted the Common Core Standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts. These standards are therefore a description of what students in Wisconsin are expected to know and be able to do by the time they graduate from high school. As a high school mathematics teacher, you will need to become familiar with these standards, and we will refer to them throughout the course, but please do not feel you are expected to be intimately familiar with them at the start—or even the end—of this semester!
  • You can download a PDF version of the standards at the Common Core website, but there is also a very useful hyperlinked version available at the Common Core Tools website.
  • The State of Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has developed a nice graphic to remind teachers (and others) of the importance of the Standards for Mathematical Practice.
  • The Wisconsin Mathematics Council is our state branch of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. You should consider attending the WMC annual conference at Green Lake in May; see the WMC website for conference and registration information.