The Mathematics of Time and Human Futures

By Kim Larkin As an artsy kid and a dreamer, I didn’t see the connection at the time, but even when I wasn’t looking for it, math was there in my life. It didn’t appear as equations, but rather as the unseen foundation underlying my fascination with finding patterns, asking why, imagining possibilities, and playing...

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Calculus for Teachers: Toward Elliptic Functions

By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, new Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. In the September Launchings, I explained a remarkable result due to Cauchy that if C is a simply closed curve and f is any complex function that is analytic in a simply connected open region that includes C,...

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The Chain That Binds

By Lew Ludwig An Administrator’s Quip “If they want to ruin their education, that is up to them. We can’t stop them.” Someone recently shared this remark from an administrator who was responding to a question about whether they were concerned about what AI is doing to student learning. The exact circumstances and preceding exchange that...

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The Putnam Exam: Why do we compete?

By Doug Ensley The MAA’s annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition has been running since 1938, and in the past 50 years, only 10 different institutions have won first place, with Harvard and MIT achieving the feat in two-thirds of those years. The competition is considered to be the most prestigious undergraduate mathematics competition in...

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Tylenol Math

By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org, @profkeithdevlin.bsky.social This past month, Tylenol went from being a red-and-white bottle most of us keep in a cupboard for dealing with physical pain—everything from a morning-after headache to post surgery recovery—to being questioned in the US as a potentially dangerous drug (for some people, pregnant women in particular). True, the current US administration...

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How I Learned to Mitigate Sustainability Issues with Maths

By Rhea Ghosal In March 2025, smoke from the Crabapple Fire north of Fredericksburg pushed across the Hill Country toward Austin. News alerts kept stuttering in, and by morning a family friend’s house was gone. Later we stood in a kitchen that still smelled of smoke, talking about wind, dryness, and how fast the fire...

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2025 MathFest Recap

By Erin Moss The National Science Foundation (NSF), via their Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE), offers several different grants that can be used to improve undergraduate mathematics education. The August 2025 MathFest provided multiple opportunities to find support for writing a grant application, including a poster session, a panel, and one-on-one meetings with NSF program...

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Filters: Math I Still Use—Even When I’m Not Using the Math

By Delia Grenville, Ph.D. By Grade 9, I already knew I wanted to study engineering. But I didn’t realize until much later—while writing this, in fact—that engineering gave me stories about math for free. In engineering, you’re not just solving for x. You’re constantly weighing what’s known, what’s assumed, and what you can safely ignore....

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Serving the Students We Don’t See

By Dave Kung When mathematician Jordan Ellenberg wanted to demonstrate to the general public How to Not Be Wrong – how mathematics can help us be more precise and successful in our thinking – he started with the story behind this famous image. When planes returned from World War II firefights, the bullet holes (in red)...

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Ethnomathematics: A Culturally Responsive Approach to Learning

By Shakiyya Bland, Ed.D. Who gets to decide what mathematics is and why it must be done in a particular way?  That question has followed me since I was a student. I remember sitting in middle and high school math classes, flipping through the pages of my textbooks, pausing at the photos of the authors,...

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