Math In Motion

By Gabrielle Birchak I grew up as a stage actress and jazz vocalist. In 1984, in high school, I was singing in a nine-member jazz group that Downbeat Magazine awarded as the best high school jazz combo in the nation. So, music was part of my existence from an early age. But, thanks to my...

---

Let MAA Help You Get the Word Out

By Doug Ensley In 2022 the MAA launched two programs with the goal of broadening access to professional development through high-quality, online experiences for the mathematics community. These programs are now fully in place, and we invite you to use them to share your knowledge, experience, and project outcomes with our national network of mathematicians....

---

Calculus for Teachers: The Definite Integral

By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, new Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. Before Cauchy, integration was usually defined as the inverse process of differentiation. This creates some problems when then there is no nice, closed form for the anti-derivative. For example, asking Mathematica for the integral from 0 to x...

---

Writing My Way into Being “Unstuck”

By Alexis Newton I sat down several times to write this blog post. At home, at a friend’s place, and now in a coffee shop with my buddy Max sitting across from me. I had come up with a compelling title, but still the words seemed to escape me. I was stuck – stuck in...

---

From Monologue to Dialogue: Engaging the MAA Community in AI Discussions

By Lew Ludwig When I first started this column over a year ago, I naively named it "There and Back Again: A Mathematician’s Tale of AI Exploration," a nod to Tolkien that I thought was a clever pun. I expected to explore generative AI and report back, complete with generating fun, Hobbit-esque images in a Shire-like...

---

Pi Day 2025:  Call for Submissions

By Pup Horst tl;dr Send your Pi-kus to blogs@maa.org by March 3, 2025. Pi Day 2025 is almost here! Join Math Values as we celebrate with Pi-kus! Pi Day is celebrated on March 14—that’s 3/14 or 3.14 (i.e. approximately π) in places that list the month before the day. This year, we at Math Values...

---

Mathematics in Nature, Perseverance, and the Role of Serendipity

By John Adam As a young boy growing up in the English countryside, I never paid much attention to nature. Then, around the age of 12, I developed a passion for astronomy, sparked by the amateur astronomer, Patrick Moore, who hosted a BBC TV show called “The Sky At Night.” He even had his own...

---

Are Remedial Courses the Best Way to Respond to a Failing Grade in Math?

By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org, @profkeithdevlin.bsky.social The title question applies—and has often been asked and debated—at both school and (first-year) university level. The issue is particularly acute for 9th Grade high school students with regard to Algebra 1. If they fail that course, they are unlikely to meet the admissions requirements when they apply to college as...

---

Projective Plane Games – Fire and Ice

By Gary Gordon and Liz McMahon We are living in a golden age for games. In previous posts, we looked at the card game SET and the closely related game EvenQuads. These games share lots of attractive properties, and in those posts, we connected those properties to an underlying geometric structure. Our goal is to...

---

Supporting Students Across Readiness Levels in Corequisite Models

By Florence Xiaotao Ran Over the past decade, developmental education has experienced major changes. More than 20 states and higher education systems have moved away from traditional prerequisite models to adopt corequisite remediation. This innovative approach enables students to enroll directly in college-level courses while receiving the additional developmental support they need, all at the...

---