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!

Related Posts

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.

How Big is Infinity? — Quanta Magazine

My latest column for Quanta Magazine explores one of my favorite topics: infinity!

At the end of the Marvel blockbuster Avengers: Endgame, a pre-recorded hologram of Tony Stark bids farewell to his young daughter by saying, “I love you 3,000.” The touching moment echoes an earlier scene in which the two are engaged in the playful bedtime ritual of quantifying their love for each other. According to Robert Downey Jr., the actor who plays Stark, the line was inspired by similar exchanges with his own children.

The game can be a fun way to explore large numbers:

“I love you 10.”

“But I love you 100.”

“Well, I love you 101!”

This is precisely how “googolplex” became a popular word in my home. But we all know where this argument ultimately leads:

“I love you infinity!” “

Oh yeah? I love you infinity plus 1!”

Learn how a staple of high school math — functions — can help mathematicians understand infinity and even describe the different kinds of infinities there are! The full column is available here and includes a few challenging exercises at the end.

How Can Infinitely Many Primes Be Infinitely Far Apart — Quanta Magazine

My latest column for Quanta Magazine ties recent news about “digitally delicate” primes to some simple but fascinating results about prime numbers.

You may have noticed that mathematicians are obsessed with prime numbers. What draws them in? Maybe it’s the fact that prime numbers embody some of math’s most fundamental structures and mysteries. The primes map out the universe of multiplication by allowing us to classify and categorize every number with a unique factorization. But even though humans have been playing with primes since the dawn of multiplication, we still aren’t exactly sure where primes will pop up, how spread out they are, or how close they must be. As far as we know, prime numbers follow no simple pattern.

There’s a tension among the infinitude of prime numbers — that there will always be primes close together and primes far apart — that can also be seen among digitally delicate primes, primes that become composite if any digit is changed. It may come as a surprise that any digitally delicate primes exist at all, but that’s just the beginning of their story. Find out more at by reading the full article here, and be sure to check out the exercises!

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