Here are some highlights from what has been another busy professional year.
In September I published a new series in the New York Times that turns Steven Strogatz’s wonderful “Math, Revealed” essays into teaching and learning resources. I got to write about favorite topics like taxicab geometry, triangular numbers, the golden ratio, and packing problems. Best of all, I got to collaborate directly with Strogatz himself! It was an honor to work with him, even if this doesn’t officially make my Erdős number four.
I’ve been thinking and writing about AI in education and math this year. I wrote about how students are using AI, how it is impacting the college admissions process, about experts calling AI-errors “sophisticated”, and how it’s affecting me as a book author. I’ve been through a few hype-bubbles in my time, and am generally skeptical by nature, but there’s no denying the impact these technologies will have in how we learn, teach, and even do math.
I’m wrapping up my 20th, and final, year as a Math for America Master Teacher, and I was proud to run one more workshop for teachers through MfA. “A One-Problem Tour of Statistics” was the story of what I learned by writing Painless Statistics, but also an homage to the kinds of math problems that you keep going back to. It was a fun and satisfying end to a string of nearly 30 workshops I’ve run in my time at MfA.
The applied mathematics and modeling program I run at my school had unprecedented success in 2025. We had a team win the NCTM Award in the 2024 High School Mathematical Contest in Modeling (HiMCM) and finish in the top ten worldwide in the 2025 International Mathematical Modeling Challenge (IMMC). Another team won the MAA Award in the 2025 MCM, finishing among the top of over 12,000 entries worldwide, nearly all of which were college teams! We also had a team earn an “Outstanding” designation — the highest honor — in the 2025 SCUDEM competition, a college-level differential equations modeling competition. I was very proud to be profiled on the COMAP website for “teaching, modeling, and mentoring at the highest level”!
This past summer I was invited to present to the Alliance for Decision Education on my work with student forecasting, after our students made impressive showings in two individual forecasting competitions in 2024 and 2025. I also appeared on MoMath’s QED and spoke with mathematician-in-residence David Reimann about math and math education.
It’s been a good year professionally, and I’m looking forward to more to look back on in 2026!
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