So I’m in a certain store in Jamaica Plain today — name kept anonymous to protect the oh-so-innocent — and I ask the clerk if they sell Hennessy Privilege (a cognac, for those of you who don’t know). She says… Read More ›
Math
“Math teachers should be more like football coaches.”
As you probably know, John Urschel is both a professional mathematician (at MIT, no less) and a recently retired professional football player (in the NFL, of course — recently retired from the Baltimore Ravens). What a combination! A few days… Read More ›
Arabic numerals? Oh, no!
Did you hear that they’re teaching Arabic numerals in public schools? I’m shocked, shocked. In America, no less! What is this world coming to? A recent poll showed that 56% of Americans don’t want public schools to teach Arabic numerals…. Read More ›
Back from New York, Part 3: Museums
We were in Manhattan, after all, so we spent a portion of each day at a museum. I’ve already reported on the Tolkien exhibit we saw at the Morgan. The next day we went to the National Museum of Mathematics,… Read More ›
Puzzle of the Week
It’s a dark panel in a dark elevator, so I’m not sure how well you can see the details, but this is the elevator panel in the hotel where Barbara and I have been staying in NYC. The puzzle is… Read More ›
Weston: New England Math Champions!
Congratulations to Weston High School for finishing first in this year’s medium-size schools division of the New England Math Championships! Weston earned 97 points to capture first place. Avon, CT, came out of nowhere to score 93 points, providing a… Read More ›
The Israeli election, consciousness-raising, a potential Nobel Peace Prize winner, the college admissions scandal, the U.S. constitution, and mostly a Sierpinskitasch — all in one post
Six topics in a single blog post? How can that be? Well, it’s all because those are six of the topics discussed in a single blog post in Scott Aaronson’s interesting blog, Shtetl-Optimized — all being examples of things that make… Read More ›
Code Girls
You know how college recommendation forms often ask “What three words first come to mind about this applicant?” In the case of Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Codebreakers of World War II, the three words would be fascinating, absorbing,… Read More ›
Crypto: The KEY to Algebra.
This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post, where I wrote “I also gave a second talk, in a breakout session, on cryptography.” The crypto talk was a bit more informal than the keynote; it had an audience of about a… Read More ›
I gave the keynote address… and lived to tell the tale!
Yesterday I delivered the Keynote Address at the annual conference of the New England Mathematical Association of Two Year Colleges. Despite being an INTJ — which means that I should have been exhausted by the presence of so many other people —… Read More ›
