Maths in Blogs

I recently had a conversation with some colleagues about Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs death from pancreatic cancer in 2011 in which my colleagues repeated the notion that Jobs would have lived if he had not experimented with “alternative” medicine prior to his surgery for pancreatic cancer — which he described movingly in his famous commencement address to the Stanford Class of 2005. There were a number of news articles and Internet posts that claimed or implied this shortly after Jobs passed away, implying or even claiming that mainstream or “science-based” medicine could cure pancreatic cancer.

As this year comes careening to a screeching halt, it's time once again for that annual tradition of the best and worst of the year...in math. And what a year it's been! Where to begin? Let's start with the good stuff.

The Best of 2017

The movie Hidden Figures (based on the book Hidden Fig

Snowboarders harness physics in a spectacular way

I was on the writing team for the 2018 MIT Mystery Hunt. I am pleased that the hunt got very positive reviews from the participants. I spent tons of hours working on the hunt and it is good that folks liked it. I edited and tested a lot of puzzles. Here is my review of these year’s puzzles that are math-related.

Sohael Babwani shares some of the important reasons why we should study algebra.

We spotted this photograph of a letter to The Telegraph, shared by Card Colm on Twitter earlier in the year. It’s exactly the kind of mathematical claim we like to enjoy verifying, so we thought we’d dig in.