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, [...]

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 am home from the Joint Mathematics Meetings, and I’m still trying to process everything I learned and got fired up about there. Most of my time was spent in formal, serious lectures, many of them quite technical, but on Friday night, I went to something completely different: a mathematical poetry reading, facilitated by the [...]

The launch of Roots of Unity was just in time for this year’s Joint Mathematics Meetings, a mathapalooza put on by the two largest professional mathematical societies (the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America). Nearly 6,000 of my closest mathematical friends are here with me in sunny San Diego taking in the [...]