It’s happened to every teacher. It’s Thursday, but your students don’t seem to remember Wednesday or Tuesday, and you’ve got three times as much material to cover if there’s any chance of Friday’s lesson working. Finally, you [...]
When Stephen Colbert introduced the word truthiness on his show, he told us to trust our guts. That’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen: in the gut. Do you know [...]
I recently posted this interesting inversion problem: The question is this: in mod n, how many functions f(x)= ax +b are their own inverses? For example, the function f(x) = 5x + 2, applied twice in mod 12, is equal to the identity. It’s [...]
I’ve been exploring a new problem with a couple of students recently that I find incredibly compelling, and I thought I’d mention it here. The main idea is looking at the behavior of functions of the form f(x) = ax + b in various mods. [...]
Math makes sense. Not only to mathematicians, it turns out. Math just makes sense. It’s internally coherent, and shows you so when probed. All the rules in math that seem like “just because”–you can think of them probably pretty [...]
These are exciting times at Math for Love! Our Teacher Circles have been seeing great results, and we’re gearing up for our spring session. Meanwhile, the Julia Robinson Festival is coming up on April 28, and we’ve already got 158 kids [...]
There has been considerable backlash against processed food products in the last few years, and for good reason. A slew of health problems implicate what we eat, and processed [...]
There are two major thrusts to math education. One is to teach skills–how to combine numbers, for example, and the definitions and rules of things in the mathematical universe. The other is teaching how to think (as it pertains to the [...]
I’d call this article, about how doubling the time students spent studying algebra led them to do better in math and also reading and writing(!) a case of burying the lead. Why? Before anyone rushes to double the lengths of all algebra [...]
Here are the questions folks contributed: From Paul: Why on earth would you break the symmetry by using a parallelogram instead of two triangles in the biggest one? I’m [...]
Here are three dodecahedra dodecagons (that is, 12-gons) a group of students I work with put together out of pattern blocks. I have some thoughts about them, but I’d like to [...]
We seem to be experiencing a brief cultural moment, in cinema, at least, to look back at slavery. Lincoln and Django Unchained at least, take place in a six-year period where [...]
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