A math teacher’s advice for parents.
Math with Bad Drawings
by Ben Orlin
2M ago
On a podcast last year, a lovely chap named Eric asked me what advice I have for parents. I always stumble over that question. Advice requires specifics. What’s your kid into? What excites, bores, and terrifies them? Who are their heroes, best friends, and aspirational Disney characters? What math have they enjoyed, hated, and regarded with cold indifference? I need to know all that (and more) before I have any definite idea how to help. But I do have advice of a sort. To thrive in math, you need the know-how. Solving systems of equations. Writing geometric proofs. Manipulating spreadsheet fo ..read more
Visit website
Why did you round 3560 to 3500 instead of 3600?
Math with Bad Drawings
by Ben Orlin
2M ago
Not long ago, in an email relayed by his father, a fourth-grade reader took issue with one of my calculations in Math with Bad Drawings: part 3 – chapter 14 -hole-in-one prize insurance pg. 169-170 12,500 to 1 payout probability and 3,500 payout ratio is written. But when I calculate the payout ratio by doing 10,000/2.81 I got approximately 3,558.7188 and when I round to the nearest hundred I  got 3,600 not 3,500. So, how did you get 3,500? Please write back to explain your thinking. His forthright inquiry demanded a forthright answer. I wrote back: What a fabulous question! Your ..read more
Visit website
A riddle about jigsaw puzzles.
Math with Bad Drawings
by Ben Orlin
2M ago
As my four-year-old gets more and more into jigsaw puzzles, my role as father has narrowed to a single, satisfying, Zen-like task: Sorting edge pieces from middle pieces. Not long ago, as my daughter tackled a 7×7 puzzle, I noticed that the two species of pieces — middles over here, edges over there — looked pretty similar in size. A quick calculation verified it: they were similar in size. The puzzle was 7×7 = 49 pieces, and the interior was 5×5 = 25 pieces, leaving 24 pieces for the edges. (You can also calculate the number of edges directly as 4 edges times 7 pieces per edge, minus the 4 c ..read more
Visit website
The Battlestar Galactica Theory of Math Education
Math with Bad Drawings
by Ben Orlin
3M ago
Last month, as I read Christopher J. Phillips’ brief and engrossing The New Math: A Political History, I found myself reciting the ominous line from Battlestar Galactica: Early in my teaching career, I spent a lot of time and life-force railing against the shortcomings of a rote math education. The mindless manipulations. The paper-thin comprehension. The lack of critical thought. I saw it as my duty to name (and blame, and shame) these patterns. As the years went by, I realized these critiques were not as fresh as they felt. People like me had been decrying methods like those not just for ye ..read more
Visit website
Should math class be hard?
Math with Bad Drawings
by Ben Orlin
3M ago
A few weeks ago, I’d have deemed this question pointless. Less a real question than a kind of vague hand gesture. But I just read a great book that shifted my thinking. [EDIT: I forgot to say which book! It’s The New Math: A Political History, by Christopher Phillips.] Now, rather than a vague hand gesture, I see the hard/easy question as a quite precise and pointed gesture. (No, not that gesture.) Specifically, the question points toward another, bigger question: What is math class really about? One possibility: Is math education for cultivating a general excellence of thought? For building ..read more
Visit website
Data Science Contest: Which U.S. Cities are the True Twins?
Math with Bad Drawings
by Ben Orlin
4M ago
Since 2019, I have lived in Minnesota’s “twin” cities. (Well, I live in one of them. Silly to have a house in both.) Twinhood is a special relationship, for cities as much as for people. Sure, we may tease each other, grow rivalrous, or jockey for statewide supremacy by falsifying the results of the 1890 census. But in the end, our bond is strong. So what, exactly, earns Minneapolis and St. Paul the title of “Twin Cities”? Well, obviously twinhood is about more than numbers, but in mathematical terms: They’re big (each more than 300,000 people). They’re close together (the downtowns are only ..read more
Visit website
What I’ve Been Reading
Math with Bad Drawings
by Ben Orlin
4M ago
For a few years, in the antediluvian epoch of 2019ish, I did annual posts of “books I love.” Then I stopped. Not that I stopped loving books. I just stopped posting about them. (I guess I got too busy writing them.) Anyway, over at Shepherd.com I shared my three “favorite” books of the current year. For what it’s worth, I share my four-year-old’s non-exclusive notion of “favorite”. (“Blue is my favorite color. And yellow. I think rainbow is my favorite color.”) So don’t put too much stock in the rankings, just in the books. I’ve also been dashing off occasional reviews at Goodreads. I declin ..read more
Visit website
A Brief Collection of Math Metaphors in Literature
Math with Bad Drawings
by Ben Orlin
5M ago
This list goes against everything I’ve been taught about good writing. Good writing, they say, is vivid and sensory. It involves punchy verbs, concrete nouns, and long descriptions of rain. Mathematics is not sensory. It is not concrete. And it is not much good for describing rain. Instead, math is a library of concepts: shelf after shelf of abstract relations between x and y. Mathematical ideas are like pencil drawings of spider webs, airy and ethereal schematics of something that was pretty airy and ethereal to begin with. And that’s what makes mathematical metaphors so perfect. The ess ..read more
Visit website
Is “data science” an academic discipline?
Math with Bad Drawings
by Ben Orlin
5M ago
I will be brief: No, it is not. “Data Scientist,” you see, is a job title. An attractive title. A title that really sparkles on a business card. A title for cool and interesting work. But not every job title has a corresponding academic discipline. Case in point: management consulting. Seemingly half of my college classmates went into this field. But their B.A.’s were in political science, French, mathematics, and so on. “Helping other organizations with strategic decisions” has no specific disciplinary tradition, no distinctive set of analytical tools, no well-defined object of inquiry—in sh ..read more
Visit website
The Other Golden Ratios
Math with Bad Drawings
by Ben Orlin
5M ago
..read more
Visit website

Follow Math with Bad Drawings on FeedSpot

Continue with Google
Continue with Apple
OR