I’m proud to be profiled on the COMAP blog, in an article that highlights the incredible work of our mathematical modeling group this past year. I’m grateful to the students for all their hard work, and to organizations like COMAP for creating opportunities to get students involved in applied mathematics and modeling. You can read the profile here.
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I’ll be a guest on next week’s Lunch and Learn webinar series from the Alliance for Decision Education, where we will be talking about how forecasting — making quantitative projections about real world events — is a great way to put mathematics in context for students. The webinar is free and open to all, and you can learn more and register here.
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Last night I ran a workshop for teachers about mathematical modeling. Modeling can be nebulous and overwhelming to those unaccustomed to applied math, so my goal was to give teachers an accessible introduction to the modeling process that allowed them to experience what distinguishes modeling from what might be considered “school math”.
The workshop was based on the work I’ve done building and running a mathematical modeling program at my school the past three years, where I’ve drawn heavily on resources from the Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications (COMAP) and modeling competitions like the MathWorks M3 Challenge.
Modeling is a wonderful way to get students doing authentic applied math, and even though I’ve got a lot to learn myself, I was happy to share what’s worked for me and my students as we have built our program.
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I saw some dispatches from the NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) annual meeting this past week, and 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.
Originally posted on Mastodon.
My latest column for Quanta Magazine is about the power of creative thinking in mathematics, and how understanding problems from different perspectives can lead us to surprising new conclusions. It starts with one of my all-time favorite problems:
Say you’re at a party with nine other people and everyone shakes everyone else’s hand exactly once. How many handshakes take place?
This is the “handshake problem,” and it’s one of my favorites. As a math teacher, I love it because there are so many different ways you can arrive at the solution, and the diversity and interconnectedness of those strategies beautifully illustrate the power of creative thinking in math.
By connecting different approaches like counting and recursion, we can connect mathematical ideas across disciplines and discover new relationships.
Like all my columns for Quanta, this piece is free to read at QuantaMagazine.org.
