Category Archives: Applied Math

Money, Money, Money

Ben Bernanke is blogging. (For some reason I find that funny: former Federal Reserve chairmen— they’re just like us!) In March, he started a blog at the Brookings Institution website. Several of the early posts are about explaining (and defending) the … Continue reading

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Turns Out You Can Be Diverse and Segregated At the Same Time

Well, it’s official, I’m an unrelenting fangirl for Dustin Cable’s Racial Dot Map and everything it stands for. If you’re not yet familiar, it’s one of the coolest data visualization projects to come out of the census data. The map … Continue reading

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The Social Side of Mathematics

Samantha Oestreicher is a recent Ph.D. in applied mathematics. She’s been blogging about social mathematics since 2007, but I only discovered her blog in December when she started a series of posts about math and tap dancing. She describes a … Continue reading

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Who Is The Anti-vax Movement? Data Science Explains.

It was all theoretical until Jenny McCarthy gave Sidney Crosby the mumps. Then it got real. Ok, I know that’s a sensationalist — not to mention flagrantly untrue — thing to say, but it’s how I suddenly felt a few … Continue reading

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Not-So-Confident Intervals

Here is a test for you. Let’s say 300 mathematicians were polled concerning how many hours of TV they watch per week. What does it mean to say that a 95% confidence interval for the average number of hours of … Continue reading

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e is for Ebola

A recent NPR blog features a few quotes emphasizing a math word that is lamentably absent from many readers’ vocabularies: “It’s spreading and growing exponentially,” President Obama said Tuesday. “This is a disease outbreak that is advancing in an exponential … Continue reading

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Alias, Schmalias

While the great line from Romeo and Juliet: “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” rings true, would a digital rose smell as sweet?  We often think of the digital world as a mere “renaming” of the … Continue reading

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Visualize Your Algorithms

As a college student in the ‘90’s with a penchant for “visual learning” I was never drawn to computer science. My one computer science class focused mostly on syntax and basic logic. Had shuffling and sorting been presented as eye-catching … Continue reading

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Summer Reading List

My Summer Reading List   Having an industry job, I will not have any real change in my routine as summer hits. But I still think of summer as the season of reading for pleasure. So what are some new … Continue reading

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Crowd-Funded Mathematics

What if your research was funded by 100 strangers who had read your research proposal online and clicked “donate”? You’d feel responsible to write about your research in a more widely accessible way. You might pledge to provide monthly updates … Continue reading

Posted in Applied Math, Math Education, Theoretical Mathematics | 16 Comments