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At the risk of making the understatement of the decade, it has been a challenging year. But 2021 offers promise along multiple dimensions. So with a hopeful eye toward the near future, here’s a review of very busy professional year.

Everything about teaching changed in the past 9 months. In March, COVID-19 sent New York City into Emergency Remote Learning. In September, we returned to schools still adapting to the pandemic. Writing about both experiences has been helpful for me: First, my unprepared reaction to going all remote in the Spring, and later, my adjustment to becoming a fully-remote live teacher in the Fall. It’s all made my second year at a new school seem like Year Five. But we are getting through it.

The biggest professional honor of the year for me came with the publication of “The Best Writing on Mathematics 2020” from Princeton University Press. It’s still a bit shocking to see my article “On Your Mark, Get Set, Multiply” featured alongside the work of incredible mathematical communicators like Steven Strogatz, Erica Klarreich, John Carlos Baez, and others.

The article was originally published in Quanta Magazine, and I explored many fun topics in my column this year, like how social distancing is a geometry problem, the power of assigning impossible problems in math class, and how we still can’t answer simple-sounding questions like “What’s the biggest shape of diameter one?“.

I also continued to write for the New York Times Learning Network in 2020, publishing “Dangerous Numbers” and “7 Ways to Explore the Math of the Coronavirus with the New York Times“. As a result of those pieces, I was interviewed for an NPR piece about teaching about the coronavirus (and received a surprising message from an old friend because of it!)

For obvious reasons, 2020 was the year of the webinar, and I gave talks, ran workshops, and participated in a variety of virtual panels this past year. This summer I participated in NCTM’s 100 Days of Professional Learning with “Coding Math at a Distance“, and ran “A Crash Course in Geogebra” through Math for America to help teachers prepare to teach geometry remotely. This fall I was invited to contribute to NCTM‘s first-ever Virtual Conference, spoke about computer science education at a PAEMST Alumni Webinar, talked Stats in the STEM Classroom as part of joint program between the Museum of Mathematics and Brookhaven National Laboratory, and participated in a panel discussion on math and media literacy during Media Literacy Week. And even though it feels like we’ve been quarantining for years, I actually travelled to Rutgers in February to give my talk “Math Outside the Bubble” in person.

I continued to review books and manuscripts for various publishers, and read a good deal in 2020 as well. I also stayed connected to the mathematical art community, working with organizations like Bridges Math and Art and the Journal for Mathematics and the Arts. I even had some of my photography on display in a exhibit alongside some of my favorite mathematical artists.

I also took advantage of some down time this summer to redesign my personal web page, PatrickHonner.com, and I updated my Speaking and Writing pages. As usual, the new year is already filling up with new and interesting opportunities, but I’m always open to inquiries and can be contacted here.

It was a full and fulfilling professional year, but like much of the world I’ll be glad to put 2020 behind us. Here’s wishing our optimism for 2021 is justified.

Related Posts

• 2019 — Year in Review
• 2018 — Year in Review
• 2017 — Year in Review
• Years in Review

The pandemic ate into my reading schedule this past year: Fewer commutes and less quiet leisure time meant less time for books. Though I didn’t quite keep pace with the past few years, I still read lots of great books in 2020. Here are some highlights.

I started the year by completing Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. I read The Three Body Problem at the end of 2019, and The Dark Forest and Death’s End were my sci fi start to 2020. It’s an interesting and ambitious story told with great imagination and detail. The Dark Forest was my favorite, but I read the the series eagerly from beginning to end. The cultural imprints on the traditional space story were also interesting to me, as someone who has lived in China but hasn’t read much Chinese literature.

As in years past, Ursula Le Guin filled much of my fiction diet in 2020, though this year it was more her fantasy work that I read. I completed the Earthsea cycle, her fantasy series about wizards and dragons aimed at young adults, and continued to enjoy her deliberate approach to storytelling and world-building.

Another notable fiction read for me this year was Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. I read this on the recommendation of Christopher Long (and Daryl Morey) and enjoyed it far more than I expected. (I think I’m still traumatized by reading some Henry James in middle school.) The historical drama also provided a nice contemporary counterpoint to all the Hamilton conversations in my household.

I read If This is a Man (also published as Survival in Auschwitz) by Primo Levi early this year. A colleague recommended the book, suggesting that Levi’s writing style, informed by his training as a chemist, appeals to the scientific-minded. Levi’s clinical descriptions of the organization, structure, and relationships of his concentration camp life were vivid and compelling. But I think it’s the writing of Levi the survivor and philosopher that stuck with me the most. It was a meaningful book to read in the cultural landscape of 2020.

Another such book, surprisingly, was Life in the Confederate Army, by William Watson. Watson was a Scottish-born engineer living in Louisiana in the 1860s who ended up volunteering to fight for the Confederate army at the beginning of the American Civil War. Watson describes the lead-up to war from his perspective, and documents his experiences as a confederate soldier with an engineer’s precision. As a first-person history it’s a fascinating account, but despite the author’s claims it certainly isn’t an objective history. In Watson’s telling, the South is the victim of failed federal leadership and corrupt politicians on both sides, reluctantly forced into war due to Northern aggression and hypocrisy. It’s a fascinating read with probably far too much to say about our current times.

Another all-too-relevant-at-the-moment book was On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt. I remembered the buzz this created 10 years ago, and examining the philosophical differences between lies and bullshit is probably even more practically applicable now than it was back then.

Another fascinating first-person history I read this year was Nine Years Among the Indians, by Herman Lehman. As an 11-year old boy, Lehman was captured by Apaches and taken from his home in Texas in 1870. He lived among Apaches and Comanches for 9 years, adopting their ways and customs and living as one of them. In 1879 he was returned to his family against his will, and struggled to adapt to his old life. It’s an eye-opening tale of Native American and American life from that era.

Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism made an impact on me this year. Though it contained nothing shocking, it presented and summarized ideas like the attention economy and the disruption of solitude in a digestible way that resonated with me. It definitely pushed me to reflect on and rethink how I live my digital life.

I also read several good mathematics and science books in 2020. The Secret Formula, by Fabio Toscano, is an exciting tale of intrigue, betrayal, and factoring cubic equations. My life has been greatly enriched by learning about the mathematical duels of the Renaissance era. I also enjoyed Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons by Paul J. Nahin, the story of the laying of the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable and the math and science that went into it.

The best science book I read this year was Tales from the Ant World, by E.O. Wilson. This short book about Wilson’s career and life as a naturalist and myrmecologist is packed with fascinating facts about ants. It was a nice follow-up to a workshop I took on ants earlier in the year, and it made ants a daily topic of conversation in our house for a time.

And to close things out with some celebratory self-promotion, The Best Writing On Mathematics 2020 is one of the most important books of the year to me personally, as I’m published in it! As I said on Twitter, it’s still a bit hard to believe.

Incredibly honored — and still quite shocked! — to have been included in “The Best Writing on Mathematics 2020” from @PrincetonUPress.https://t.co/torJL3nxXU

— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) December 2, 2020

As always, I’m grateful for great recommendations and for the Brooklyn Public Library system. My reading list for 2021 is already growing, so if you have recommendations of your own please let me know!

Related Posts

• Books I Read in 2019
• Books I Read in 2018
• Books I Read in 2017
• Years in Review

I’ll be presenting “Bringing Modern Math into the Classroom” as part of the NCTM 2020 Virtual Conference. Here’s the description for my talk:

New mathematics is created and discovered every day, yet the mathematics we teach is hundreds, if not thousands, of years old. How can we build connections for our students between the mathematics we currently teach and the mathematics at the edge of discovery?

The talk is based on my column for Quanta Magazine, where I connect cutting edge research to curricular math. In addition to this talk for NCTM, I’ll be running two workshops on Bringing Modern Math into the Classroom for Math for America this year.

You can find out more about the NCTM 2020 Virtual Conference and register here.

Related Posts

• Coding Math at a Distance — #NCTM100
• NCTM Annual 2019
• NCTM Annual 2018