Cosmologists have been thinking for years that our universe might be just one bubble amid countless bubbles floating in a formless void. And when they say “countless,” they really mean it. Those universes are damned hard to count. Angels on a pin are nothing to this. There’s no unambiguous way to count items in an [...]

I suffer from eschatological obsession. That is, I spend lots of time brooding about ends. So the cover of the September Scientific American—which reads simply "the end."—made me all shivery, like when I hear the spooky sitar opening of The Doors’ apocalyptic rock poem "The End." (I’m never more Freudian than when I hear Morrison’s [...]

Back when I was a high school math geek, our math team would go to meets that occasionally had tables set up to encourage us to pursue various careers that would make use of our mad math skillz. The one such profession where the level of encouragement far outstripped our teenaged interest was the actuarial [...]

James Abram Garfield was born on this day, November 19, in 1831. Had an unstable, delusional stalker’s bullets and nineteenth-century medical “care” not cut short his life just six months into his presidency, he would be 181 today (more on that later). Garfield was an intelligent man who studied some math in college, but contemporary [...]

I was at a math conference last week, and one of the other attendees brought a puzzle. I am a pretty slow puzzle-solver, so it will be a while before I figure out how to assemble those five pieces to get this. Three views of the assembled puzzle. Saul Schleimer, a mathematician at the University [...]

A Wikipedia edit-a-thon seems like a fitting tribute to the woman many consider to be the first computer programmer. October 16 is Ada Lovelace Day, an annual observation designed to raise awareness of the contributions of women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) disciplines. Groups in the U.S., U.K., Sweden and India are marking [...]

For decades, scientists have been trying to solve a tough question: if the Internet runs out of cat pictures, can we generate more using advanced mathematics?* A paper posted on the arxiv earlier this month by mathematicians Kathryn Lindsey and the late William Thurston calms fears about “peak cat.” In the paper, they describe a [...]

On Tuesday, Scientific American turns 167 years old. It doesn’t exactly look like the kind of anniversary we usually celebrate, with our decimal normative number system that overvalues ending zeroes and fives, but 167 is a pretty neat number. First of all, we can insert two symbols into it to get a correct mathematical statement: [...]

William Thurston, whose geometrization conjecture changed the fields of geometry and topology and whose approach to mathematics and mathematics education has reverberated throughout the mathematical world, died on August 21 following a battle with cancer. He has appeared in the pages of Scientific American in the article The Mathematics of Three-Dimensional Manifolds, which he co-wrote [...]

Unlimited, or Pay-Per-Ride? That’s the question posed by the New York Times City Room blog this morning, as New Yorkers confront the great algebraic unknown of August: are unlimited subway passes still a good value even if you’re going out of town on vacation? Perhaps the author, reporter Clyde Haberman, has been reading too much [...]

In an opinion piece for the New York Times on Sunday, political science professor Andrew Hacker asks, “Is Algebra Necessary?” and answers, “No.” It’s not just algebra: geometry and calculus are on the chopping block, too. It’s not that he doesn’t think math is important; he wants the traditional sequence to be replaced by a [...]

Music just ain’t what it used to be. At least, that’s the stereotypical lament of each receding generation of music listeners. It’s also one way to read a new study on the evolution of pop music in the past half-century. A group of researchers undertook a quantitative analysis of nearly half a million songs to [...]

I hope you’re ready for your big Pi Approximation Day party tomorrow. You might have observed Pi Day on March 14. It gets its name from 3.14, the first three digits of the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Always on the lookout for excuses to eat pie, some geeky math types also [...]

Have you ever watched “Mean Girls”? It’s one of the movies before Lindsey Lohan really began to let her career slip. She plays Cady, a smart girl, homeschooled by her parents as they lived in Africa until her high school years, where, desperate to fit in AND to “get the guy”, she dumbs down her [...]

On Monday, Harald Helfgott of the École Normale Supériure in Paris posted a proof of one of the oldest open problems in number theory to the preprint repository arxiv. The ternary Goldbach conjecture, like so many questions in number theory, is easy to state but hard to prove. Every odd number greater than 5 can [...]

Many math teachers have a hands-on approach to their subject, but those hands aren’t usually covered in finger paint. Scott Goldthorp, however, sometimes teaches messy math classes. Goldthorp, a teacher at Rosa International Middle School in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, was the grand prize winner of the inaugural Rosenthal Prize for innovation in math teaching, [...]

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 15 [...]

Today I have a piece in Slate about that pi meme that’s been going around. According to the meme, your life story is encoded in pi somewhere. My life story would probably include the word “Evelyn” at some point. (I’m going out on a limb, but stay with me.) In a code that assigns the [...]

There’s a contest going on right now that could reward you for letting your geek flag fly. Spoonflower, a fabric design website, is hosting a “geek chic” design contest that closes April 23. It’s held in conjunction with Robert Kaufman Fabrics, and the lucky winner will get to create a fabric collection for Robert Kaufman. I had [...]

Rather appropriately, April 1st is the 91st day of the year, at least in non-leap years such as 2013. 91 might look innocent, but it’s a sneaky little number because 91=7×13. That might not seem sneaky to you, but I’m here to tell you why it is. Every whole number can be broken down into [...]

On the one hand, I like Pi Day because I get to eat pizza and/or pie, and I like things that get people excited about math, but on the other hand, I’m an adult, and I get to eat pizza and/or pie whenever I want, Pi Day or no. Like Matt at Math Goes Pop, [...]

Wrong in Public is a new, hopefully very occasional, series on Roots of Unity. I don’t like being wrong in public, but sometimes I make a mistake in a post, and sometimes mistakes are interesting. In last Friday’s post on the 4-color theorem, I talked about some of the hypotheses of the theorem, including the [...]

The 4-color theorem is fairly famous in mathematics for a couple of reasons. First, it is easy to understand: any reasonable map on a plane or a sphere (in other words, any map of our world) can be colored in with four distinct colors, so that no two neighboring countries share a color. Second, computers [...]

I wrote a few blog posts while I was at the Joint Mathematics Meetings back in January, but now you can read some more comprehensive coverage of the meetings at the American Mathematical Society website. In addition to AMS staff members, there were three of us former AAAS-AMS Mass Media Fellows in the press room, [...]

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, biologist E. O. Wilson asks if math is necessary for doing great science. At first glance the question seems rather pointless and the answer trivial; we can easily name dozens of Nobel Prize winners whose work was not mathematical at all. Most top chemists and biomedical researchers have little [...]