There is a new online initiative called We Use Math, which is meant to address and answer one of the most common questions that high school students have: when am I ever going to use math in the real world? The idea behind this project is to motivate students to pursue mathematics-based careers, by helping...

The following is a guest post by Stephen Weimar (Director of the Math Forum) and Valerie Klein (Professional Collaboration Leader) from Drexel University. Recent economic hardships have demonstrated that the understanding of financial and mathematical basics is critical in keeping this country afloat. Too...

Google Docs is a great way to collaborate on documents and for a lot of people can probably replace large, expensive office suites with a free, online solution. When I first started using the service, the features were pretty basic. I noticed today that there was a link to a list of new features. A couple of...

Today I’m announcing a pet project of mine that I think may interest some of my readers. Any new books? is a free notification service which enables you to subscribe to a series of subjects that interest you and receive weekly emails about new book releases in those categories. These books are...

Some readers may be familiar with Bob Palais’ article “π Is Wrong”. Within it Palais argues that π is the wrong choice of circle constant. This quote, from the author’s website, summarizes his main argument: As noted in the last page of the pdf, I suggest calling the alternate...

StackOverflow is a popular community that was launched by two famous programmers: Joel Spolsky (of Joel on Software fame) and Jeff Atwood (of Coding Horror fame). The aim of this site is to provide a fun environment in which to discuss programming subjects and ask coding and software engineering...

Project Euler can be an addictive site for people who are passionate about mathematics and programming. You don’t need to be an expert in either of these two disciplines to participate in it’s challenges, but any such skills you may already possess will be an asset. The author of the site,...

We first mentioned Rejecta Mathematica almost two years ago. While it did take them a while, the site has finally gone live and they recently announced their inaugural issue, which contains papers that have been rejected by peer reviewed journals on mathematical sciences. The most interesting feature of...

Wolfram Research finally launched Wolfram|Alpha, the much talked about “computational knowledge engine”. It’s unusual description is justified by the fact that we are not dealing with a search engine in the classic sense of the term, nor with the next Google. At first glance we’re...

Seven years ago Stephen Wolfram published A New Kind of Science. I remember the hype surrounding this book. Journalists jumped at the chance to praise a heavy tome that was too complex for most of them to fully understand, but that shipped with an ambitious title and the implicit guarantee that comes from a...