MrHonner

2021 in Tweets

Here’s a tweet-per-month review of my 2021. Enjoy!

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

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By MrHonner, ago

2021 — Year in Review

A return to in-person schooling was the biggest news of 2021. I don’t want to be accused of burying the lede.

It’s been great to be back. It’s also been an interesting challenge trying to weave together what I learned over the past year-and-a-half as a full-time remote teacher with what I was doing in-person before that. Add in new colleagues, redefined priorities for teacher teams, and a brand new course to teach and it’s been a pleasantly busy return to the building.

I’ve also stayed busy with a variety of talks and webinars this past year. As always I ran several workshops for Math for America, like Bringing Modern Math into the Classroom in January and It’s All Linear Algebra in November. This summer I participated in a roundtable discussion at the National Museum of Mathematics on math education. And I was thrilled and honored to run a week of morning math for the Park City Math Institute’s Teacher Leadership Program, satisfying two long-standing professional goals: to participate in PCMI and to finally make sense of complex multiplication!

I continued to write my column for Quanta Magazine, which is on ongoing professional highlight. The year started with the crooked geometry of round trips (an article that was picked up by Wired magazine) and covered everything from hot dogs to goats to tricky job interview questions.

I was proud to keep up my Remote Learning Journal throughout the 2020-21 school year, and was happy to have the opportunity to reflect on the totality of my experience on the MAA’s Math Values blog, where I published “Let’s Remember the Year Everyone Wants to Forget“. I was also able to capture some fun moments in writing this past year, with a short story about an absolutely brilliant student solution to a calculus problem as well as a Seussian poem proof of the irrationality of the square root of 2.

Without question my single biggest professional project this year, writing or otherwise, was getting a manuscript submitted. I knew it would be more work than I expected, and it was. But the process was exciting and eye-opening and worthwhile, and I am thrilled that Barron’s Painless Statistics will be out in June 2022.

It’s been another year full of challenges, changes, and opportunities, and I hope 2022 brings us a healthier balance of all those things.

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By MrHonner, ago

Books I Read in 2021

Returning to work in person in 2021 meant returning to the subway, and I tried to make the most of the extra reading time.

The most notable math book I read this year was A Mind at Play, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman’s biography of Claude Shannon. Shannon pioneered the development of Information Theory, which ultimately revolutionized multiple disciplines by allowing information of all kinds to be uniformly treated as a simple mathematical object. In many ways Shannon’s story is that of the eccentric genius, from boyhood tinkering in the Midwest to juggling on unicycles at MIT, but the book avoids caricatures and tells an engaging story about both a fascinating person and a groundbreaking scientific discovery. I’ve also been enjoying Information Theory: A Tutorial Approach in an attempt to better understand the mathematics of Shannon’s work.

Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators, the history of the digital revolution, was a serendipitous companion read to the story of Claude Shannon. The Innovators starts with Ada Lovelace and mechanical looms and ends with hypertext and Wikipedia, telling the story of the many breakthroughs along the way — both technical and commercial — that made personal computing and the internet possible. Isaacson continually makes the point that innovation requires more than just a lone genius with a world-changing idea: Each individual innovation is usually just one step in a long chain of ever-evolving ideas. In addition, having good ideas is rarely, if ever, enough: Getting people to accept those innovations is itself a challenge. As the computing pioneer Howard Aiken famously said, “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”

Fortune’s Formula was another enjoyable read from this past year, with some similar characters and backdrops as Mind at Play and even The Innovators. And I finally got around to reading Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise. Silver has lost a lot of credibility since first being deemed a statistical wizard following his accurate predictions of the 2008 Presidential Election, but his book is a thorough and well-researched introduction to the challenges and successes of elementary statistical forecasting.

As always I read a lot of science fiction this year. I devoured The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, a fun and fast-paced series of short novels about a corporate security cyborg who hacks its own governor module and struggles to adapt to its newfound freedom. I also read several novels in Iain Banks’s Culture series, though the books are so good I’m trying to pace myself. I know I’ll be re-reading The Player of Games again someday soon.

I read both of Ted Chiang’s books of stories this past year — Exhalation and Stories of Your Life and Others — which are full of not only fresh and rich ideas that seem so obvious in retrospect, but also the kind of writing that makes amateur writers think to themselves “Why do I even bother?”

Piranesi

NPR posted a list of the top 50 sci-fi and fantasy books of the past decade, and I picked up many new books from that list this year. One was Sarah Gailey’s The Echo Wife, whose story of a scientist at the forefront of human cloning was much more personal, and more disturbing, than I anticipated. And thanks to a recommendation from Jordan Ellenberg, I read Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, a beautiful, thought-provoking, surprising book that ended up in a few stockings this Christmas.

As always, many thanks to the Brooklyn Public Library for providing access to books all year! And thanks to all who recommended books throughout 2021. Please keep them coming in the new year.

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By MrHonner, ago

What Hot Dogs Can Teach Us About Number Theory — Quanta Magazine

My latest column for Quanta Magazine was inspired by the true story of me being frustrated by a six-pack of hot dogs.

If you’ve ever had to buy hot dogs for a cookout, you might have found yourself solving a math problem involving least common multiples. Setting aside the age-old question of why hot dogs usually come in packs of 10 while buns come in packs of eight (you can read what the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council has to say about it here), let’s stick to the math that gets our hot dogs to match our buns. A simple solution is to buy eight packs of hot dogs and 10 packs of buns, but who needs 80 hot dogs? Can you buy fewer packs and still make the numbers match?

Trying to get hot dogs and buns to match up is a simple exercise in least common multiples, but it also opens to the door to more complicated math using the Chinese Remainder Theorem, a 2,000 year old algorithm for solving systems of congruences. Learn more by reading the article, which is freely available here.

By MrHonner, ago
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