What I Wrote in February 2019

I’ve started a monthly email newsletter collecting my writing, some of the things I’m reading, and a few other odds and ends. You can subscribe here.

• For Quanta Magazine, I wrote about recent research showing that only countably many non-intersecting Möbius bands can fit into three-dimensional space. If you don’t know what any of that means, don’t worry, I explain it in the article.
• You can ask the same question about letters in the plane: which letters can you fit uncountably many of, and which letters are too big for that? It’s complicated.
• Kevin Knudson and I published two episodes of our podcast My Favorite Theorem. Our Very Special Valentine’s Day episode featured Nikita Nikolaev and Beatriz Navarro Lameda talking about their mathematics-themed wedding and the intermediate value theorem. Later in the month, Cynthia Flores told us which Rick and Morty episode was the best for watching after learning about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
• February was Black History Month, and I shared some ways to listen to black mathematicians.
• I interviewed Ken Ribet, outgoing president of the American Mathematical Society, for the AMS Notices (pdf).