I just finished teaching the last class of my fourth semester teaching an undergraduate class for the math phobic called "A Survey of Mathematics." The course is essentially designed to be the math credit for the liberal arts student; it will be the last math class most of the students take. When I began teaching the course I was told that there weren't any particular topics I needed to cover, and my goal should be to change some of the students minds about mathematics. I've had carte blanche to cover any areas I thought were interesting, and that I thought my students would find interesting.
As I've taught the class more and more, I've found covered a number of different areas and found that a liberal sprinkling of history and neat applications help convey the point that math is cool, and that it isn't a mystical and useless collection of rote equations, but rather is a living, growing, and always evolving language spoken by actual people, and used to solve real problems.
Each time I've taught the class I've tried a different (hopefully improving) approach, and I've collected a number of lectures on diverse areas and applications of mathematics. It is impossible to cover every area of mathematics, but I've attempted to cover things that I find interesting, and that my students find interesting. Like the title of the blog suggests, we learn a little bit about a lot of things. This blog will be an attempt to take what I've done in my course and explore things a little further, still just scratching the surface.
