Monthly archives for August, 2019
Mathematical Mondegreens
This post originally appeared at scientificamerican.com.
I transcribe every episode of My Favorite Theorem, the podcast I cohost with Kevin Knudson. It’s important for accessibility (and yes, I do judge you if you publish a podcast with no transcript, especially if you have a decent budget), but I’ve also found that a lot of hearing people pr [...]
Should We Eat Less Rice?
This post originally appeared at scientificamerican.com.
“Your Bowl of Rice Is Hurting the Climate Too” reads a Bloomberg headline from June. “Rice cultivation could be as bad for global warming as 1,200 coal plants, so why aren’t consumers more bothered? Eco-conscious consumers are giving up meat and driving electric cars to do their part fo [...]
The Longest Matrilineal Chain in Math
This post originally appeared on scientificamerican.com.
The Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) is a website that collects information about the advisors and students of PhD mathematicians. It can be fun to waste a little time clicking around the site, finding famous ancestors (I’m one of Leonhard Euler’s 113,581 known mathematical descendan [...]
The Only Way to Win Is Not to Play th...
This post originally appeared at scientificamerican.com.
When I became a math and science writer, I had no idea that one of the most common requests I would get would be to weigh in on order of operations problems that somehow go viral in some segment of the internet. The latest one I’ve seen is 8÷2(2+2).
My favorite headline for this o [...]
Chasing Completeness
The University of Utah, where I used to work, is built into the foothills on the east side of Salt Lake City. It is at a higher elevation than most of the city, so of course to get there one has to gain elevation. As a bicycle commuter, I was interested in gaining elevation in the least difficult way possible. Eventually I did find a route I [...]
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