Although she holds a Ph.D. in economics from Boston College, Rosemarie Emanuele is an associate professor and the chair of the Department of Mathematics at Ursuline College in Pepper Pike, Ohio, just outside of Cleveland. She loves to teach math but also pursues research related to the economics of nonprofit organizations and volunteer labor, and has published in both economics and interdisciplinary journals — as well as in the book that inspired this blog. She is the proud mother of an amazing five year old daughter.
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Math Geek Mom: Time
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By Rosemarie Emanuele
November 5, 2009 9:40 pm
Last week was a difficult one in my family, as all of us got hit with a bug that is going around. I suspect that my daughter brought it home from school, and she was the first to be hit, followed closely by me. My husband eventually got it, but only on the weekend, when it conveniently would not conflict with any “billable hours” in his practice. I managed to re-arrange my teaching so I could ...
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Math Geek Mom: Maternity leave and my first year (Mod 7)
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By Rosemarie Emanuele
October 30, 2009 10:42 am
If you try to divide 365 by 7, it does not come out evenly. 364, however, does divide evenly, meaning that if you divide 365 by 7, you get a remainder of one. This fact, when coupled with information on leap years (every 4 years), non-leap years (what should be leap years, but end in 10) and “re-instated” leap years (years that end in 10 that should be a leap year, but also are divisible by ...
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Math Geek Mom: Palindromes and Growing Up
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By Rosemarie Emanuele
October 22, 2009 7:17 pm
When my daughter was barely five years old, I told her the phone number of someone we knew, a number that went something like “8448”. I then told her that the number was special, since it was a “palindrome”, and was the same forward and backwards. She looked up at me, and, without missing a second, said “Like Hannah Montana?” It took me a few seconds to realize that the word ...
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Math Geek Mom: Women in Science and Math
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By Rosemarie Emanuele
October 15, 2009 8:34 pm
A long time ago, in a college that now seems to be a galaxy far, far away, I started my college career thinking that I was going to major in physics. While I did go on to earn a minor in the subject, it wasn’t long before I realized that I could apply the same math used in physics to study the economy, and I changed my major to economics, going on to earn a Ph.D. in the field. Besides, when I ...
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Math Geek Mom: Looking Backwards
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By Rosemarie Emanuele
October 9, 2009 12:39 am
This one week when I was ahead of myself and wrote my entry early in the week, and, what do you know, I find myself changing it at the last minute. I was so intrigued by Dana Campbell’s column yesterday talking about what may be the truth behind the idea of well-educated women “opting out” of high-pressure jobs in order to parent that I wanted to write some thoughts in reply to it. She did ...
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Math Geek Mom: Not so Happy Meal
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By Rosemarie Emanuele
October 1, 2009 8:29 pm
Ok, so I admit it. I am not a good cook, and, on top of it, I spend a lot of time driving my daughter around to various lessons and even doctor’s appointments. Although I know better, the other day I drove through McDonald’s in an effort to get something resembling dinner in her. I have done the calculations of what the best deal was in order to feed her, and have decided that, at this point ...
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Math Geek Mom: Altruism, and the Wild West
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By Rosemarie Emanuele
September 24, 2009 9:48 pm
The term “altruism” is used in economics to describe the situation where one person’s well being depends, in part, on the well being of another, perhaps leading to donations of time or money. In contrast, the term “impure altruism” is used, without any sense of judgment on the giver, to describe a situation where the giver improves their own well-being not just from the improved state ...
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Math Geek Mom: The Small Print
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By Rosemarie Emanuele
September 17, 2009 9:43 pm
One of the first things I learned upon becoming a mom was that I needed to be much smarter than I am. I needed to become my child’s advocate in many arenas, and some of these were areas that I had no knowledge of. For example, I needed to become, in many ways, my daughter’s primary care physician, looking out for her health as I assembled the information presented by doctors of different ...
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Math Geek Mom: Infinity and Aardvarks
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By Rosemarie Emanuele
September 10, 2009 9:29 pm
Last week, my first grader came home with thoughts about math (I love it when she does that!) She said that, since one hundred plus ten was “one hundred and ten”, that, therefore, infinity plus ten must be “infinity and ten”. Of course, infinity is not a number that can be added like one hundred, so the analogy did not hold. Indeed, infinity is one of those math concepts that lead one to ...
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Math Geek Mom: Probabilities and Possibilities
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By Rosemarie Emanuele
September 4, 2009 11:31 am
Last week, as classes started, I performed an experiment that I always use on the first day of each of my classes in statistics.I use the fact that everyone in the world must share one of only 365 birth days (366, if you count leap years). This therefore implies that the chances of finding, in a group, two people who share a birth date is actually quite high. In fact, people who have used this ...
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