Puzzling over Math with Scott Kim

By Tim Chartier, Davidson College Scott Kim is a puzzle and video game designer, artist, and author. He began writing for Discover Magazine in 1990 and became an exclusive columnist in 1999. He’s created hundreds of puzzles for magazines such as Scientific American and Games, and thousands more for computer games. So, let’s exercise our...

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On Directed Reading, Curiosity, and Baseball

By Christopher Keyes Christopher Keyes Back in January, I was scrolling through the spreadsheet of student applications to our university’s directed reading program. I scanned for topics aligning with my expertise as a grad student in number theory that would be fun to work on with an undergrad in a one-on-one setting. In previous semesters,...

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Positioning Our Students as Problem-Posers

By Chris Bolognese Chris Bolognese The Scottish Book In the early 1930s, local mathematicians gathered in a small café in a town in Poland to converse about their latest mathematical conjectures. Now renowned for their contributions to analysis and topology, Ulam, Mazur, and Banach would meet at this hangout regularly, known as the Scottish Café....

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Trusting/Fearing Students

By Debra K. Borkovitz Debra K. Borkovitz In 2005 my Crohn’s disease flared during the first week of classes at Wheelock College. I ended up needing to miss two weeks, and I wasn’t able to find a substitute for my advanced class. The six students, most of whom I knew from previous courses, made a...

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Making the mathematics education sausage

By Keith Devlin @profkeithdevlin “People who like sausage should avoid watching it be made.” Old saying There’s an old Irish joke that goes like this. A motorist pulls up in front of a pub, winds down the window, and addresses an old man sitting at an outside table sipping a glass of Guinness: “Excuse me,...

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My Mathematical Journey: From F = ma to E = mc^2

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and former Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences This month I have chosen to write about the genesis of a very important book in my development as a writer, Second Year Calculus: From Celestial Mechanics to Special Relativity....

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Making a Major League Baseball Team with Math: An interview with Tim Zue, Boston Red Sox

By Iain Anderson, Tim Zue, and Susannah Cate Iain Anderson Tim Zue, a native New Englander and graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a pioneer in sports-business analytics, particularly for his work managing the financial arm of the Boston Red Sox since 2015. To learn more about working in Major League Baseball and hints...

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Writing About Mathematics for a General Audience

By Keith Devlin Keith Devlin You are a math educator and, for whatever reason, you decide you want to write about mathematics for the general public. Power to you. Most people are woefully informed about mathematics—and are not able to solve a typical 8th Grade problem. So for the good of society, getting the word...

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Sines of Disability: Disrupting Ableism in Mathematics and Beyond

By Dr. Daniel Reinholz & Lisette Torres-Gerald Dr. Daniel Reinholz When you think about a mathematician, what comes to mind? Do you think of a disabled person? If you’re following common stereotypes in society, almost certainly not. Although disability and mathematics have received a lot of attention in broader society, much of it has been...

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My First Time at the AMC

By Tim Chartier Since 2020, high school students ages 15 to 18 submit compelling math communication projects to the National Museum of Mathematics, also known as MoMath, as part of the Steven H. Strogatz Prize for Math Communication. Cash prizes are awarded to the authors of the winning submissions who share a love of math...

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