October is ending, but worry not. My sources tell me additional Octobers have been scheduled for through at least 2030.
Aroundup of badly drawn activities from the month:
1. Memes with Bad Drawings
The greatest MWBD meme yet comes from my dear friend John Oliverio (a.k.a., the secret protagonist of Chapter 4 in Math with Bad Drawings):
Be the Thanos you want to see in the world, friends, and go buy Math for English Majors. All majors are welcome!
2. The Nonstandard Notebook
I’m thrilled about the recent release of Tim Chartier and Amy Langville’s gorgeous Nonstandard Notebook (to which I was honored to contribute a foreword). It’s a collection of mathematically creative notebook pages (inspired in part by Matt Enlow’s work).
And it is, in a word, fabulous.
Check out this interview with Tim and Amy, and then read Eugenia Cheng’s praise:
This is what every math book should be—an invitation to creativity and interaction. It makes my mathematical heart leap with joy. I need to buy many copies so that I can keep one copy to stare at but have several to use as actual notebooks in different ways, not to mention give them to everyone I know.
Go buy one! If Eugenia can buy “many,” then you can surely afford “a few dozen.”
3. How to teach math when you’re not a “math person.”
I enjoyed contributing this piece of friendly advice to SmartBrief (paywalled). It begins:
Moses didn’t want to lead. Cincinnatus didn’t want to fight. And you, if you’re reading this—well, I doubt teaching math reduces you to delighted shrieks. (Other kinds of shrieks, perhaps.)
If this describes you, feel free to get in touch; I’m always happy to chat with new colleagues!
4. For the Bored Panda in your life.
Kornelija Viečaitė at Bored Panda kindly interviewed me for the piece 80 Entertaining Math Memes For People Who Like Crunching Numbers:
“Math is gorgeous and bizarre,” Ben tells us…. “It gives us fractal coastlines, logical paradoxes, infinities nested like matryoshka dolls… At its best, math will blow your mind into little pieces, and then stitch those pieces back together into a whole new mind that better appreciates the weirdness of our universe.”
5. Stacking Benjamins
Appearing on this finance podcast, I had more fun than should be possible while appearing on a finance podcast. Thanks so much to Joe for his gracious hosting. I am honored to be one Benjamin stacked among these many.
6. Three Favorite Books
This trio (published 2022, 2019, and 1970) are the books I selected for Shepherd.com as my favorite reads of the year. It’s a nice book recommendation site; not clear if anyone will be able to topple the dubious supremacy of Goodreads, but I applaud the effort.
7. Quote of the Month
I’m not sure I’ve ever read a better 15-word summary of math teaching than this formulation from the fabulous Patrick Honner:
Get students doing mathematics.
Engage them intellectually and socially.
Pay attention to how they think.
Strikingly, this pithy wisdom came embedded in a long sigh about how blindingly obvious such wisdom ought to be (bolding mine):
I’m always disappointed at what constitutes professional discourse in math education. Beyond the facile messages of “thought leaders” and influencers, even the messages of purported substance seem like a continual re-telling of what should be obvious to everyone. Get students doing mathematics. Engage them intellectually and socially. Pay attention to how they think. These should not be revolutionary ideas.
Not knowing the specifics of what elicited Patrick’s groans, I wouldn’t presume to defend those “messages of purported substance.”
But in a more general sense, I’ll happily defend the role of the platitude in intellectual life. Much of wisdom, I find, is simply surfacing the right platitude for the right moment. (Case in point: this month, Patrick’s re-telling of the obvious happened to resonate with me!)
7. A cartoon on the value of pure inquiry.
8. Parting Puzzle: How transitive is correlation?
Here’s one for the data scientists out there.
Say we don’t know anything about the relationship between the variables A and C, but we know that each one has a 0.7 correlation with B.
What are the strongest and weakest correlations that might exist between A and C?
(For the solution to last month’s parting puzzle, see here.)
8. Spooky Postscript: Halloween being Halloween, I refer you to the finest thing I’ve written in my career: The Differentiation: A Survivor’s Tale. (Less spectacular but also on-theme are The World’s Spookiest Math Stories and The Test of the Parallels.)
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