Critical Issues in Mathematics Education at MSRI

Next week I’m heading to the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley, CA to participate in the 2019 Critical Issues in Mathematics Education (CIME) conference.

CIME brings together academics, researchers, industry partners, and teachers to discuss important issues in education. The theme of this year’s conference is mathematical modeling in K-16 education. Here’s a summary of the goals from the conference website.

The CIME workshop on MM will bring together mathematicians, teacher educators, K-12 teachers, faculty and people in STEM disciplines. As partners we can address ways to realize mathematical modeling in the K-12 classrooms, teacher preparation, and lower and upper division coursework at universities. The content and pedagogy associated with teaching mathematical modeling needs special attention due to the nature of modeling as a process and as a body of content knowledge.

I’m proud to be representing K-12 teachers as well as Math for America at this year’s CIME, where I will be presenting as part of the conference’s opening panel along with Jo Boaler, Ricardo Cortez, and Maria Hernandez.

A full schedule and list of speakers is available at the CIME conference website.

UPDATE: The full video of our panel discussion can be seen here.

By MrHonner, ago

02/19/2019 — Happy Permutation Day!

Today we celebrate a Permutation Day! I call days like today permutation days because the digits of the day and the month can be rearranged to form the year.

We can also consider today a Transposition Day, as we need only a single transposition (an exchange of two numbers) to turn the year into the day and date.

Celebrate Permutation Day by mixing things up! Try doing things in a different order today. Just remember, for some operations, order definitely matters!

By MrHonner, ago

Unscrambling the Hidden Secrets of Superpermutations — Quanta Magazine

My latest column for Quanta Magazine brings the exciting story of superpermutations down to the level of high school counting.

A superpermutation is a string of symbols in which each permutation, or arrangement, of those symbols appears in some order. Imagine, for example, you are trying to thwart the evil plans of a mad scientist and must key in a secret passcode:

Suddenly, inspiration strikes. If you punch in 123451, you’re actually trying two codes: 12345 and 23451. Even better, entering 1234512 will succeed if the code is 12345, 23451 or 34512.

You do some quick calculations. Instead of keying in 600 digits to cover all the possibilities, you now only have to enter 153 digits. You have just enough time — and it works! You’ve saved the day. It’s a good thing you read about “superpermutations” in Quanta.

Finding minimal length superpermutations is a open research problem in mathematics, but recent developments have come from the most unlikely of places! Find our more by reading the article, which is freely available here.

By MrHonner, ago
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