2005 Trevor Evans Award Recipient
Stuart Boersma, Central Washington University

Stuart Boersma of Central Washington University in Ellensburg, WA has won a Trevor Evans Award from the Mathematical Association of America. The awards are made to authors of expository papers that are accessible to undergraduates and are published in Math Horizons.

In "A Mathematician's Look at Foucault's Pendulum" Stuart Boersma gives us a wonderful mathematical exposition of the motion of a pendulum on a spinning sphere. Beginning with a quote from Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum, Boersma takes the reader through an intuitive discussion of the motion and then gives a thorough mathematical discussion of the pendulum. All the while he poses questions that carry the discussion beyond the pendulum to topics like curvature of surfaces.

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