Posts tagged math communication
How Not to Be Wrong (Book Review)
How Not to Be Wrong, the first popular math book by University of Wisconsin-Madison math professor Jordan Ellenberg, just hit the shelves. In addition to a Ph.D. in math, Ellenberg has an MFA in creative writing and has been writing about math for popular audiences for several years. Unsurprisingly, the book is witty, compelling, and just pla [...]
Bad Statistics: Ignore or Call Out?
3-D pie charts are usually misleading. Image: Smallman12q, via Wikimedia Commons.
Andrew Gelman has been wondering how much time he should spend criticizing crappy research, and so am I. He wrote the post after a discussion with Jeff Leek of Simply Statistics about replication and criticism. Harsh criticism of preliminary studies could discou [...]
On Teaching Analysis
Timothy Gowers, University of Cambridge mathematician and Fields Medalist, is teaching an analysis class this term, and fortunately for me, he’s blogging about it. Analysis IA is part of the first-year math major sequence at the University of Cambridge, and it is a rigorous approach to calculus at the undergraduate level. I am teaching a simi [...]
Felix Klein on Mathematical Progress
A diagram of a Klein bottle, one of the many mathematical objects named after German mathematician Felix Klein. Image: Vierkantswortel2, via Wikimedia Commons.
“With the present means of publication and the continually increasing number of new memoirs, it has become almost impossible to survey comprehensively the different branches of m [...]
Significantly Statistical Blogs
Image: xkcd.
It’s almost Halloween, so I thought it was appropriate to write about something scary: statistics! (That was a joke, statisticians.) As a mathematician, I can get by in statistics, but I am not a native speaker. As someone who writes about math and science for a non-specialist audience, I think that statistics and an accura [...]
This Week in Number Theory
A visualization of the twin primes using an Ulam spiral. Created by Silveira Neto and shared under a Creative Commons-attribution-share alike license.
The week of May 12 was pretty big for number theory. I wrote about some of the blog coverage of the two major results.
By now you’ve probably heard the announcements of two big results in numbe [...]
Mathy Ladies to Follow on Twitter
Image: Design Shack
In the current issue of the Association for Women in Mathematics newsletter(password required), Anne Carlill asks where the female mathematicians are on Twitter:
“I found that the only female mathematicians or math educators I followed were Nalini Joshi in Sydney and Fawn Nguyen in California. In contrast there are about 1 [...]
The Mathematics of Planet Earth
This is my first contribution to a new blog hosted by the American Mathematical Society, the Blog on Math Blogs. My co-editor Brie Finegold and I are “touring the mathematical blogosphere” to help people keep up with math news and find new blogs to read. My inaugural post is about the Mathematics of Planet Earth blog.
Like the ini [...]
Strength in Numbers: Mathematicians U...
A satellite view of Earth. Mathematicians across the globe are devoting 2013 to studying the mathematics behind a wide range of processes on our planet.Image: NOAA/NASA/GOES Project.
Over at Scientific American, I wrote about the Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013 initiative.
What do polar ice caps, guinea worm disease and wildfires have in com [...]
Joint Math Meetings Wrap-Up
Over at Roots of Unity, I wrote a wrap-up of some of my and other people’s coverage of the Joint Math Meetings back in January.
Getting my blog on in the Joint Math Meetings press room. Image: American Mathematical Society.
From my coverage of Fields medalist Cedric Villani’s Gibbs lecture: “You should call it entropy, for t [...]
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