Welcome To The Blog

Our new blogger takes a walk with her service dog Delilah.

If you’re new to the blog, welcome. We are the Blog on Math Blogs, your premier destination for blog reviews, tours of the mathematical blogosphere and all the cool math stuff that lives on the internet (omg there’s so much of it this internet thing is never-ending). And beginning next month we’ll be joined by a new co-editor, Rachel Crowell!

Just like Evelyn and me, Rachel is part of the proud lineage of AAAS-AMS Mass Media Fellows. Every summer the AMS sponsors one mathematician to work at at a mass media news desk. Something like NPR, Wired, Scientific American, or in Rachel’s case, the Oregonian. It’s good for science and it’s good for the world, since I’m sure we can agree there should always be more mathematicians everywhere all the time. But it’s also a really great experience for anyone with a technical background interested in writing, as Rachel was when she applied. Over the years the AMS has collected essays on the experiences of past fellows.

After studying math at the University of Missouri, Rachel was the 2015 fellow working at the Oregonian in Portland, Oregon, where she was part of the storytelling team. She wrote a bunch of articles while she was there, including a lot of coverage for the local science going on at the universities around Portland. Since then Rachel has been writing for the AMS Math in the Media blog, as well as freelancing at other venerable science news purveyors.

Rachel writes for Science News for Students, a super resource for plain english science articles about all sorts of current research, scientific and mathematical. Rachel wrote a fun piece about different jobs that use geometry to study motion, from crash test dummies to video game design.

She’s also been writing for the millennial focused PBS affiliate site Rewire.org. Over there she was working on some really fun Buzzfeed style quizzes, like “Which Top New Species of 2018 Are You?” I’m the Swire’s Snailfish. Depressing since this makes me the top predator among bottom feeders. Not exactly how I prefer to self-identify.

Rachel has a soft spot for applied math, and likes thinking how different types of math affect our day-to-day life. She’s also really into the craft of science and math writing, and wants to share more resources for people who want to get in on that.

I asked Rachel about her ideas for the blog moving forward, and she said she really wants to talk to you, the bloggers and readers and citizens of the internet, to cover your blogs and your interests. If you have ideas for Rachel or a blog you’d like to share, she encourages you to reach out by email (racheljcrowell at gmail dot com) or you can find her on Twitter @writesRCrowell.

And of course you can always find me on Twitter @extremefriday.