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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Calculus for Teachers: Complex Integration

By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, new Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. Once we get into complex integration, the theorems become much more technical, so in most cases I will simply state the result, possibly with some indication of why it makes sense that it would be true. For anyone...

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Low Stakes, High Rewards: How a Corequisite Course Improved Student Performance in Intro to Proofs

By Ekaterina Yurasovskaya With its highly abstract material and proof-writing that students encounter for the first time, Introduction to Proofs often turns into a gatekeeper to a mathematics major. At the Mathematics Department at Seattle University, we achieved significant results by creating a lecture-free, problem-solving ungraded co-requisite course called Mathematical Communication and Reasoning (MCR). The new...

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When Water Isn’t Really Water

By Lew Ludwig The hamburger graph has become my unexpected companion this summer. It first appeared in a workshop I was co-facilitating, comparing the water usage of AI prompts to beef production. Then it surfaced again a few weeks later - and that's when I realized we weren't really arguing about water at all. The first...

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Where do our numbers come from?

By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org, @profkeithdevlin.bsky.social The numbers we use every day are so familiar, and so much a part of life, it’s easy to forget that they are a recent invention, having been introduced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sure, humanity has had some form of numbers for at least ten thousand years, and...

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