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Link: Addendum to post on a free education I just found this effort to use TED talks as high school curriculum. Nice idea.

Matt Damon said it first, in Good Will Hunting: one day, you’re going to realize that “You dropped 150 grand on a $%*#ing education you could have got for $1.50 in late charges at the public library.” Here’s the paradox of [...]

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long, but I’ve decided to start teaching the art of inquiry to everyone I tutor. Step 1: all my private students will have the homework of bringing in a question to every tutoring session. I’ve run [...]

Math for Love just made the list of 50 best blogs for math majors! In honor of that, I’m going to point to one of the other blogs listed there, which I expected not to like, but actually found pretty fun: MAA MinuteMath. When I see the [...]

Link: My Advisor and His Wife They always seemed like a great couple to me, and I can’t resist referring to this article on the two of them. The artist and the mathematician: both tapped in to the creative process. They also believe that [...]

My father, were he alive, would have turned 67 this week. He died in 1999 from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. One of the treasures he left behind, or rather, collection of treasures, were his books. I just finished one of these books, called [...]

And then I went out to tango. Feeling pretty good.

I went to a linguistics lecture in college to hear a speaker talk about how they had written Dr. Seuss type books for kids. One gem from that talk that always stayed with me is that there are three topics that are immediately interesting [...]

I often stress the perspective that the first thing you need do be a great teacher is love: love of your subject, love of teaching, love of learning. The skills you need to actually teach come naturally from the fundamental interest, [...]

A huge thank you to Jade, who referred me to this compelling argument for not teaching mathematics (or teaching less mathematics, or teaching it in a different way). Should we, as Gray argues in the link, dispose with the teaching of [...]

There’s a great story in the beautiful, tragic, triumphant story of Ramanujan. Ramanujan emerged from India in the early 1900s (out of nowhere as far as Western mathematicians were concerned), and quickly emerged as the greatest natural [...]

Link: “I am a mathematician, and I would like to stand on your roof.” Speaking of excellent talks, you should definitely watch this one. This is a look at African fractals, which are surprisingly ubiquitous throughout Africa, and which [...]