Angel F. Tenorio Villalón

¿Cómo explicar matemáticas sin hacer uso de las matemáticas en el contexto de las aulas de mayores? - [How to explain mathematical contents to senior people but not using maths?]

Almost all the Spanish universities have implemented nonregulated study programs for senior people (i.e. 55-year or older people). The goal of these programs is to allow these people to get the opportunity of access to university studies for those that couldn’t study in the university or those that want to return again to the university life. In general, contents to be considered for this teaching should be related to the knowledge that university produces, but using a language and approach avoiding technicality and academicism. This leads to change the way to explain and approach mathematics when preparing lectures for this student collective. In this paper, we present some experiences that were performed under this teaching paradigm when explaining mathematics to senior people, commenting some of the difficulties to be faced during the preparation of the lectures and materials.

Computing abelian subalgebras for linear algebras of upper-triangular matrices from an algorithmic perspective

Abstract In this paper, the maximal abelian dimension is algorithmically and computationally studied for the Lie algebra hn, of n×n upper-triangular matrices. More concretely, we define an algorithm to compute abelian subalgebras of hn besides programming its implementation with the symbolic computation package MAPLE. The algorithm returns a maximal abelian subalgebra of hn and, hence, its maximal abelian dimension. The order n of the matrices hn is the unique input needed to obtain these subalgebras. Finally, a computational study of the algorithm is presented and we explain and comment some suggestions and comments related to how it works.