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Joined: Feb 2010
Posts: 462
Member
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Member
Joined: Feb 2010
Posts: 462 |
I am the professor who taught the epsilon geometry course in 2011. I taught from the beautiful Green Lion edition of the famous T.L. Heath translation of Euclid's Elements. This is the book I used when I taught upper level undergraduates and graduate students at UGA in Athens, GA. This is considerably above the level of the geometry course I myself had in high school and also what is normally available now, say from Harold Jacobs' book Geometry. These kids were stronger than a typical college class and I just loved teaching them, although it did take a good part of the first week for us to get to know and respect each other. I apologize for my primitive class management skills. But I think we mostly solved this within three days.
We went from scratch, Euclid's own postulates, and a critical examination of them in the light of modern theory, mostly due to Hilbert, and guided by the beautiful book by Robin Hartshorne, written for his college class at UC Berkeley. I ended up showing how the limit theory of volumes in Euclid and Archimedes allowed the computation of the volume of a sphere, and then leads to calculus, and even wrote up but did not present, an argument for how Archimedes could have computed the volume of a 4 dimensional sphere.
I conjecture there is no way the kids could have ever seen this material before, unless they went to college. Indeed I made up some of it myself just for them. But they are so bright, it went well, better even than when I taught it in college. Since this stuff was so intense and high powered, we had an afternoon class in which we did only hands on constructions of solids from cardboard, such as icosahedra and dodecahedra, and they really enjoyed that. For this I myself learned for the first time how to really construct a pentagon. I had never learned it in high school and not really grasped it in grad school even when i taught it until last summer. If you want to explain something to 9 year olds, or anyone, you should really understand it! In preparation for the course, we emailed about some advanced algebra, including Euler's explanation of how to solve both quadratic and cubic equations, something I had not understood that well before even though i had taught it to grad students.
This year I envisioned going forward with a more general geometry course on curved geometry, showing that Euclid's geometry fits in between positively curved and negatively curved geometry, as the case of flat geometry, i.e. zero curvature. Thus we would cover spherical geometry first ( a surface of positive curvature) and then geometry of negative curvature ("saddle surfaces") and show how the curvature is reflected in the angle sum of a triangle. I.e. on a sphere, the angle sum of a triangle is more than 180 degrees, and gets larger as the area of the triangle gets larger. For negatively curved surfaces the sum is smaller than 180 degrees, and there is an upper bound to the area of a triangle. if time allowed we would explore tessellations of the various planes by polyhedra, including negatively curved ones which allow more possibilities.
Ultimately I found I did not have have time to prepare adequately for this course since I was learning the material myself, and when I admitted this and withdrew, George hired an expert who is a college professor with research experience at the highest level in this material (he has published on it in the best research journal in America, Annals of Math.), and I believe it will be very exciting for the kids. The Euclidean geometry course will also be repeated for the newcomers. And there will be other courses as well.
Pardon me if my participation was unexpected, but I hoped to be able to answer some of the questions asked here. My experience was that the camp organizers are of the highest quality and focus primarily on mutual respect and mathematical expertise of the first order. I would send my kids. The expertise of the faculty is quite high. Basically they are research mathematicians qualified to teach graduate students in the area.
The demands on the kids for sitting and listening at length seemed high, but I was amazed at their ability to do it well. When I saw kids who were busying themselves doing something else, sometimes I called on them to keep them involved (I knew all their names) but the second week I eventually just gave them their space, and spoke mostly to those who were listening. At the end I really liked those young people and they made me feel they appreciated and liked me. i will never forget that experience. We live all our lives as teachers hoping to meet students whom we can help at this level.
If you want to see what we did mathematically, you may consult the books mentioned, and also my notes from the class which are on my webpage and were made available to the students along with the course. (See http://www.math.uga.edu/~roy/, near the bottom.)
I am willing to bow out here so the discussion can proceed candidly if desired. Thank you for writing this! I just wanted to repeat how much my son LOVED these two weeks of math. We cannot attend this year, but will attend next year since he will still be young enough.
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Joined: May 2011
Posts: 329
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Joined: May 2011
Posts: 329 |
Sounds like it could be an interesting camp for my mathy PG boy. It's in my neck of the woods this year, so we were very interested. I tried three times to get someone to return a call or email me from the camp, but never got a response. I gave up and assume the experiences must be hit or miss. I wonder if there's another camp like it that we could pursue? Anyone have additional recommends?
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Joined: Jun 2012
Posts: 11
Junior Member
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Junior Member
Joined: Jun 2012
Posts: 11 |
Here is the email I have for Kathy Zehender of epsilon camp, but I also got no response last week from it.
kathy@epsiloncamp.org
She says on her website that they have a spam filter that may drop some emails, and one should call, but you say you tried that. I just know that last year it was not quite fully subscribed, so I am slightly surprised if it is this year. Maybe the feedback like the nice comments here from last year made it more popular?? George Thomas' reputation alone was apparently enough to launch it last year "sight unseen" for most people. He is still running it, and does just a superb and inspirational job.
I know of no other camp for the same age group. You might try calling and/or emailing again if still interested. I think this offers a unique experience.
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Joined: Jul 2012
Posts: 1
New Member
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New Member
Joined: Jul 2012
Posts: 1 |
Hi, I'm Kathleen Z from Epsilon Camp.
syoblrig, I'm sorry that you had difficulty contacting the camp this year. The camp phone goes to a voice mailbox which I access online, and camp emails go directly to Dr. Thomas, the executive director of Epsilon. To the best of my knowledge, I've returned all the phone messages that I received this year.
If you (or anyone else) is interested in finding out more about Epsilon or would like to know if the camp might be a fit for your child, I invite you to email me at the address in mathwonk's post above. We'd love to hear from you!
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Joined: Aug 2009
Posts: 36
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Junior Member
Joined: Aug 2009
Posts: 36 |
I came by this thread while looking up other topics here on Gifted Issues. I was at Epsilon Camp 2011 toward the end of the program, as one of the presenters of parent programs, and will be there for the entire length of Epsilon Camp 2012, again working with the parent program. To me, one of the best signs that the program started well, even when it was brand new, is that about half of the families who attended last year are coming back for a second year of Epsilon Camp, and they have generally been talking it up favorably among the families they know in online networks we are mutually part of. My oldest three children are all too old for Epsilon Camp (my oldest attended MathPath, during one of the years when it met at Colorado College). I would be glad for my youngest child to attend Epsilon Camp, as a local friend of hers has.
I encourage the participants in Epsilon Camp 2012 to share been-there-done-thats here and elsewhere online so that parents can think about the trade-offs of participating or not on the basis of varied and complete information. During the camp, feel free to tell the staff exactly how you really feel about how things are going, as I expect the ongoing effort will be to improve the program continually in all aspects.
I'll see the 2012 participants by next week. Safe travels to all.
"Students have no shortcomings, they have only peculiarities." Israel Gelfand
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Joined: Feb 2012
Posts: 353
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Joined: Feb 2012
Posts: 353 |
I'm wondering about this for next year (2013), and specifically am wondering whether there is some kind of demo lecture online to see whether it would hold DD's attention. I think she might enjoy it, but it can be hard to predict sometimes how she will react to things (especially an entire day of math, for two weeks) and it would be nice to see whether she was interested in a snippet. I'm going to also email the Epsilon person at the email above, but wondered if anyone here knew--or knew of anything similar. If that's not available, is it like EPGY, or Khan academy, or anything else I might be able to show her?
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Joined: Jun 2012
Posts: 11
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Joined: Jun 2012
Posts: 11 |
well it is not like khan academy, which is an excellent explanation of math ideas, but intended to remain as simple as possible, accessible to essentially anyone.
epsilon camp is oriented to to the very strongest math types. I tried to be as clear as the lectures on khan academy (within my ability), but i did not need to assume as consistently that the students did not know anything. I was face to face with these brilliant kids and thus could see how I needed to ramp it up. One day after starting, I realized just what i was dealing with in terms of ability, and shifted gears accordingly.
so i guess i am saying epsilon camp was on the level appropriate to the students in attendance, which was very very high. as i said above, epsilon camp is like upper level undergraduate school, but for children.
i would like to hear from attendees from 2012. my own information is that the camp was even more successful than the previous year, which makes me ecstatic. best wishes to all, and i still invite every camper to contact me for advice or tutorial in math as long as you/I live. do not feel bad if you have no time to do this as i know you are the cream de la cream who are in everyone's sights, and have many commitments,
best regards,
Roy
Last edited by mathwonk; 09/22/12 07:57 PM.
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Joined: May 2015
Posts: 15
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Joined: May 2015
Posts: 15 |
Sorry for the thread necro!
Has anyone considered Epsilon Camp for their 7-11 year old or has sent their children to the summer program recently? It has been a while since this anyone has contributed to this thread and I wanted to make sure that this Camp is still a popular one. Through the Davidson Young Scholar weekly emails, we have seen this program advertised a number of times. Seems they have two separate programs, one geared for the 7-8 year olds and one for the 9-11. DS7 will be going to a different program this summer, but will be of age for their older program in the summer of 2018.
Looking forward to hearing about your experiences!
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Joined: May 2015
Posts: 15
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Joined: May 2015
Posts: 15 |
What did you mean by another camp in AR? Arkansas? From what I understand in perusing the information on the website, a parent will have to attend with the child. So the parent and child live in a dorm room for the two weeks? How old was your DS when he attended last year? Was the camp overwhelming to him in any way? Current curriculum states that students will be working through Euclid's Elements. Is that what he experienced? DS works with pre-algebra elements often and has been exposed to a good amount of algebra. If he's comfortable with the pre-test on this link other than the last two questions in part C, would that be a sufficient minimum for the camp? Thanks in advance!
Last edited by dynasty; 04/08/17 12:57 AM.
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Joined: May 2015
Posts: 15
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Thank you so much for taking the time to share your experience Portia! Just to clarify, DS7 would not be going to Epsilon camp this year as the admissions deadline has already long passed. This summer he will be going to one of the camps at Davidson (STARS) for a week to get him used to the experience of living away from home. He will be 8 next month, which will put him at the 9 year old minimum for the Epsilon Camp's 2018 Summer session.
Can you explain a little bit more about the parent program that runs in tandem? Are all the parents corralled into a room of their own each day?
Since many of the instructors from last summer are now starting a camp of their own in AR, do you worry about possible diminished level of instructor quality? I just looked up Camp Squared and it seems to be a one week camp with three of Epsilon Camp's previous instructors.
From what you shared about Epsilon Camp so far, my interest is definitely piqued!
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