` Rodney Nillsen's web site

                  Rodney Nillsen
                                                                                                                                                                                                           Selected publications
                                University of Wollongong,  New South Wales,  Australia                                                                                Contents of this site

    Mathematics     Reviews     Universities     Education     School mathematics      Comments        
                       
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Writings
The Poetry of Reason has appeared as a chapter in the book Navigating the Complexities of Post-Academic Life: Ageing, Identity and Professional Transition, edited by Joanne Yoo, Hilary Yerbury, Nina Burridge, Bill Johnston and Sheila Webber, Routledge, 2026. You may read about this book. Also, you may read the article Fundamentalism in Australia's university system, published in Rationale by the Rationalist Society of Australia.




 
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  Higher education
The link higher education issues goes to some submissions and articles about universities and higher education policies in Australia, with one dating back to the government's 'white paper' of 1988. You can read a submission to the Bradley Enquiry.

 


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School mathematics
The paper Equal Representation is in the Australian Mathematics Education Journal, vol. 6, 2024. This is a school-level discussion on equal representation in society. In the picture, the area $A$ is equally represented in $X$ and in $Z$. Read about equal representation. Read about applications of school mathematics.

 

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  Mathematics, history and philosophy
The article Infinitesimal Knowledges appeared in Axiomathes (2022). In the 17th century, mathematicians were using new methods and the notion of indivisibles. This led to paradoxes that undermined earlier mathematical certainty. This article considers these issues with reference to Amir Alexander's book Infinitesimal, and to language, history, pedagogy and knowledge.

 

 
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Dynamical systems
Randomness and Recurrence in Dynamical Systems: a real analysis approach, with a foreword by Kenneth A. Ross was published by The Mathematical Association of America in 2010. An aim of this work was to discuss aspects of randomness in dynamical systems without using measure theory. There are reviews by David Hand, Svitlana Rogovchenko and James A. Walsh. You may read more about dynamical systems.


 
 
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Fourier analysis research
Let ${\mathbb T}$ be the set of complex numbers of modulus $1$. A function $g\in L^2({\mathbb T})$ is called a difference if there is $b$ in $\mathbb T$ and a function $h\in L^2({\mathbb T})$ such that $g(x)=h(x)-h(bx)$ for almost all $x$ in $\mathbb T$. In 1972, Gary H. Meisters and Wolfgang Schmidt proved for a function $f\in L^2({\mathbb T})$ that $\int_{\mathbb T}f(t)\,dt=0$ if and only if $f$ is a sum of $3$ differences. Building on this work, Difference Spaces and Invariant Linear Forms identifies a new phenomenon in Fourier analysis. Read more about Fourier analysis research.
 
. . . and how hast thou plentifully declared the thing as it is?     
                                      Job 26:3

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    "All truly liberating acts are genuinely altruistic and involve freely accepted renouncement of some freedoms" -- Igor Kluvánek. Read about the mathematics and ideas of Igor Kluvánek, and some more of his quotations.
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"If one stops oneself from thinking about all this, one makes oneself an accomplice of what is happening" -- Simone Weil. Read a review of Robert Zaretzsky's book on Simone Weil.
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"Integrity requires us to view things in their organic reality, not their mechanical reality." Read more about integrity in teaching and learning.
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"...... postmodern thought, for all its 'radical' and 'subversive' pretensions, is merely an application of the ideas of market forces ... to the world of the intellect. Of course, both [postmodernism and market economics] have the same effect of trivialising the serious life of the mind." Read more about changing intellectual culture.
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Read a review of Everywhen: Australia and the language of deep history, Ann McGrath, Laura Rademaker and Jakelin Troy (eds), NewSouth Press, published in The Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 2023.
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This page updated 7th August, 2026