Outreach and expository talks

I've given about a dozen talks under the auspices of the (now defunct) Franklin College Outreach program.

K-1 (That's a K as in Kindergarten):
Even and odd numbers

Grades 2-5: How many hairs are on your head? A technique for estimating large numbers.
Grades 4-5: Help I'm lost! An introduction to geometry, distances, and circles as they show up in working with maps.

For students thinking about majoring in math:
Wobbling tables, the intermediate value theorem, and an introduction to topology - All in 15 minutes. I can do it in 13 minutes if I don't write the title on the board.

Math Club talks:
The chord theorem,
Foliations of the plane - Non-Hausdorff spaces arise naturally. Depending on your definitions, the classification of 1-dimensional manifolds is not as simple as you think.

For prospective graduate students:
An introduction to topology - I forget what I talked about, but I'm sure it was great.
The Klee trick - The ultimate combination of point-set and algebraic topology.

VIGRE talks for current graduate students:
Geometry from the topological point of view - Topology and geometry are intermingled in the study of covering spaces of surfaces.
An introduction to contact topology - The keywords for this talk are: families of 2-planes in 3-space, integrable vs. non-integrable distributions, singular foliations on surfaces, ODE's, knot theory, DLP television, and for good luck, fluid flows. Hopefully this ends up serving as a sort of coherent introduction to contact topology.

It isn't every day that you can understand an article written by a mathematician, and of course it isn't every day that you want to. Still, today might be that day, and these articles don't take much in the way of background mathematics.

Contract Law 101.111... (this was published in Math Horizons).

A trailer, a shotgun, and a theorem of Pythagoras (to appear in The Montana Mathematics Enthusiast).

I was a consultant for several years on an NSF funded project (Support and Ideas for Planning and Sharing in Mathmatics Education) at Chase Street Elementary School.

I served on an NSF panel for reviewing proposals on Directed Research in K-12 education.

I have been an educational consultant for Pearson Education.