Search Results for: MathBabe

Medaling Mathematicians

You may consider the Fields Medal a boon to the mathematical community as it showcases amazing young mathematicians and brings math into the limelight. Or you may view the Fields Medal as an unfortunate reinforcement of the notion that mathematics … Continue reading

Posted in Events, Math Education, Mathematics and the Arts, Number Theory, people in math, Theoretical Mathematics, Uncategorized, women in math | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Medaling Mathematicians

The Inaugural Breakthrough Prizes in Mathematics

Last month, the inaugural Breakthrough Prizes in mathematics, founded and partially funded by internet billionaires Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg, were awarded to five people: Simon Donaldson, Maxim Kontsevich, Jacob Lurie, Terence Tao, and Richard Taylor. The prize is $3 … Continue reading

Posted in people in math | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

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

Posted in Applied Math, Mathematics and the Arts, people in math, Recreational Mathematics, Theoretical Mathematics | Tagged , | 1 Comment

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

Bad Statistics: Ignore or Call Out?

Andrew Gelman has been wondering how much time he should spend criticizing crappy research, and so am I. He wrote the post after a discussion with Jeff Leek of Simply Statistics about replication and criticism. Harsh criticism of preliminary studies … Continue reading

Posted in Statistics | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Why Should We Fund Math Research?

As my co-blogger Brie Finegold mentioned last month, Cathy O’Neil of mathbabe.org has been writing about how MOOCs might change the face of math departments and, ultimately, how math research gets funded. O’Neil is concerned that without calculus classes to … Continue reading

Posted in Applied Math, Issues in Higher Education, people in math, Theoretical Mathematics | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Job Security Calculus: Reasoning about our futures

Most academics have a love/hate relationship to teaching, and especially teaching Calculus.  Prior to the first exam of the semester, it seems that everyone in the class is there for learning’s sake, discussing ideas, engaging in problem-solving.  But we worry … Continue reading

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Rankings, Standards, and Inquiry, Oh my!

Ranking As concern for K-12 standards in public education has come to a head,  the quality of teaching and learning in our public universities has also come under public scrutiny.  Recently, President Obama announced that he wanted to rework the … Continue reading

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This Week in Number Theory

By now you’ve probably heard the announcements of two big results in number theory: Yitang Zhang of the University of New Hampshire proved that there are infinitely many pairs of primes whose differences are under 70 million, and Harald Helfgott … Continue reading

Posted in Theoretical Mathematics | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments