2022 — Year in Review

In keeping up with (what is now a 10-year!) tradition, here’s a brief review of my professional year.

Without question my biggest professional accomplishment of 2022 was the publication of my book, Painless Statistics. People are buying it and even saying nice things about it! From start to finish it was an incredible learning process, and I now know what is meant by the saying “It is better to have written a book than to write one.”

I was happy to resume giving talks and workshop again in person in 2022. In the spring I returned to Queen’s College to speak to soon-to-be math teachers about making math by design. And after two years of remote-only teacher workshops, I was thrilled to return to the Math for America offices for The Geometry of Linear Algebra. It’s been exciting to learn so much linear algebra as I teach it, and I already have new workshops and talks scheduled for 2023.

On top of publishing Painless Statistics, it was another busy year of writing. As usual my column for Quanta Magazine provided a year full of the best kind of mathematical challenges, and I had a blast writing about brownie bake-offs and geometric dissections, different kinds of infinities, and Wordle, among other things. And I reviewed Ben Orlin’s book Math Games with Bad Drawings for the American Mathematical Monthly.

Above all, it was just nice to have a professional year that seemed to be trending toward normal.

Here’s to an even more normal 2023!

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2022 in Tweets

Here’s a tweet-per-month review of my 2022. Enjoy!

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

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Review — Math Games with Bad Drawings

It was a pleasure to review Ben Orlin’s wonderful book Math Games with Bad Drawings in the American Mathematical Monthly. The review is available online, with subscriber access, here, and will appear in the next print edition of the Monthly.

And in case you’re still shopping, Math Games would make a fabulous holiday gift for the math enthusiastic, math teacher, math student, or math parent in your life!

The Geometry of Brownie Bake Offs — Quanta Magazine

In my latest column for Quanta Magazine I combine my love of geometric dissections with my appreciation of The Great British Bake Off.

Gina the geometry student stayed up too late last night doing her homework while watching The Great British Bake Off, so when she finally went to bed her sleepy mind was still full of cupcakes and compasses. This led to a most unusual dream.

There’s a remarkable result in geometry that any two polygons of equal area are “scissors congruent”. In my column I explain what this means, why it’s true, and how it connects to some recent research about a famous impossible problem!

You can read the full article here.

Workshop — The Geometry of Linear Algebra

I’m running a workshop for math teachers tonight titled The Geometry of Linear Algebra. We’ll take a purely geometric approaching to developing the important properties of linear transformations and explore how those properties connect to fundamental notions of linear algebra like vectors, matrix multiplication, and change of basis.

The workshop is part of the ongoing learning that’s happening as a result of teaching linear algebra at the high school level. I’ve taught linear algebra many times, but only in recent years did the course start making sense to me as a whole. The key, as it has been so often in my teaching career, was to see it as a geometry course.

I’ll be offering the workshop through Math for America, where I’ve given talks and offered workshops on linear algebra, geometry, and many other topics.

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