Doing Math with Intellectual Humility

Math class is an opportunity to teach students both how to use conjecture to arrive at knowledge and how to learn from the logic of peers.
Photo taken in the Bourbaki Congress of 1938 in Dieulefit

The Mathematical Pranksters behind Nicolas Bourbaki

Bourbaki was gnomic and mythical, impossible to pin down; his mathematics just the opposite: unified, unambiguous, free of human idiosyncrasy.
"Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the East" by Florence Nightingale, 1858

Florence Nightingale, Data Visualization Visionary

The woman who revolutionized nursing was also a mathematician who knew the power of a visible representation of information.
The number 2

The Quantum Random Number Generator

It’s real. And it will use quantum entanglement to generate true mathematical randomness. Here’s why that matters.
A model showing the layers of Earth

The Woman Who Found the Earth’s Inner Core

Inge Lehmann was the seismologist and mathematician who figured out what the Earth's core was actually made of.
Physarum polycephalum

Amoebas Are Smarter Than They Appear

Why slime molds can solve math problems that you can't.
NCAA free throw math

The Math Behind the Perfect Free Throw

The fate of a free throw is set the instant the ball leaves the player’s fingertips.
platinum-iridium cylinder

What’s a Kilogram?

At the end of the nineteenth century, the kilogram was conceived as the mass of one liter of water at 4°C, the temperature at which water was densest.
NYC Marathon runner

The Quest for A Faster Marathon

How big a difference does air resistance make when running a marathon? Nike tried to find out recently. A look at the science behind the 2-hour marathon.
Heads quarters

The Statistics of Coin Tosses for Theater Geeks

At the beginning of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a coin toss lands as heads 92 times in a row, the odds of which are a mere 1 in 5 octillion.