When people find out I'm a mathematician, they assume I'm into numbers. I find this assumption frustrating (and a little sad) since there's so much more to math than numbers, but the truth is that I am into numbers -- so into them that I'm writing a book about them. It's also the case (though…

Mathematical Enchantments

18.02.2024

Plus and Times Set Free |

This essay chronicles the liberation of plus and times from narrow notions about what sorts of things can be added and multiplied — and, relatedly, what sorts of things numbers should be. With the advent of abstract notions of fields and rings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, algebraists took addition and subtraction…

Mathematical Enchantments

18.03.2024

Nine Years of Blogging About Math |

[This month's post is a transcript of a talk I gave on March 13, 2024, as part of a UMass Lowell "Conversation Starter" event on the topic of scientific literacy and communication. I was addressing other members of the Kennedy College of Sciences, so I treated mathematics as a subfield of the sciences, though I…

Mathematical Enchantments

18.04.2024

“Jewish Mathematics”? |

Quick math-personality quiz: What is seven-and-one-fourth minus three-fourths, expressed as a mixed number (a whole number plus a proper fraction)? What matters isn’t what answer you get but how you arrive at it; your thought-process will reveal what kind of thinker you are. So please stop reading now and continue once you’ve found the answer.…

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Mathematical Enchantments

Science

What “a 96 percent chance” doesn’t mean |

Plus and Times Set Free |

Nine Years of Blogging About Math |

“Jewish Mathematics”? |

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Mathematical Enchantments