On March 11, 2004 a series of bombs exploded aboard four commuter trains in Madrid, Spain, killing 192 people and injuring 2050. The Spanish police recovered a bag containing detonating devices which had a latent fingerprint that the Spanish shared with the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation...

singingbanana released an interesting video about the odds of flipping 10 heads in a row. It is basic probability and the video is entertaining enough to warrant sharing it with your friends, regardless of their mathematical...

The other day I received a math book that’s geared towards children. It’s called “You Can Count On Monsters” (USA | UK | Canada) by Professor Richard Evan Schwartz. This mathematics book is unconventional in the sense that it’s mostly comprised of drawings, with relatively few words or formulas....

Concavity characterizes so much of the world — from the distribution of sizes of animal species, to the potential return-on-investment from small vs large companies, to the temperature of a warm body in a cold room, to the results of sports training. To explain concavity, I’ll talk about training...

Today Kalid Azad released a premium edition of his well-received Math Better Explained ebook. This brand new edition (available for a limited time for just $47) boasts a screencast for each of the 12 chapters in the book, as well as a 3-part interview about developing your mathematical intuition with Scott H...

In this interview we sit down with author and mathematician Derrick Niederman to discuss his engaging, recently published book about the first two hundred natural numbers, ‘Number Freak: From 1 to 200, The Hidden Language of Numbers Revealed’. 1. Some of our readers are likely familiar with your...

Misconceptions about probability theory and statistics have major repercussions on society. From seemingly minor things like the excessive sensationalism of some headlines, all the way to the jailing of innocent people based on “statistical evidence”. One of the most common misconceptions is the...

Last weekend I had a chance to read Math for Moms and Dads, which I received from Kaplan as a review copy. This book aims to providing a friendly guide for parents of children ages ten and up, who are struggling with mathematics. Many parents face the challenge of helping their children with math homework,...

Imagine a rope that was just long enough to wrap tightly around the equator of a perfectly spherical earth. Now imagine that the length of that rope is increased by one meter and again wrapped around the earth, supported in a regular way, so as to form an annulus. Doing things in this way will form a certain...

1. The Tenth Dimension 2. Outside in (Turning a sphere inside out) 3. Flatland the film (Trailer) The full movie is available on DVD, and of course, you can also get “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions”, dirt cheap (a classic geek novel for less than 4 bucks). If you prefer, you could...