#mathematics Timeline

1y

#mathematics #cats

When you finally find a real life solution you can apply maths to:

Picture of 2 cats, both share a box but one is also in another box.

Formula (x+x^y)^y but x is a cat drawing and y a box drawing.

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256d

Mathematics Teaching 296 now available online https://atm.org.uk/Mathematics-Teaching-Journal-Archive/177731

Design and cover photographs by me

Four free articles for non-members:

Everyone can think mathematically by Tom Francome
Tom Francome explores ways of developing the mathematical thinking of all students, including low attainers.
https://atm.org.uk/write/MediaUploads/Journals/MT296/02.pdf

Book review Learning with AI by Ian Benson
Ian Benson reviews 'Learning with AI' by Joan Monahan Watson published by Johns Hopkins University Press (296 pages, $24.95)
https://atm.org.uk/write/MediaUploads/Journals/MT296/14.pdf

Book review Breaking images by Pete Wright
Pete Wright reviews ‘Breaking images: Iconoclastic analyses of mathematics and its education’, edited by Brian Greer, David Kollosche, and Ole Skovsmose.
https://atm.org.uk/write/MediaUploads/Journals/MT296/15.pdf

Ole Skovsmose—the man who put the critique in critical mathematics education by Peter Gates
Peter Gates has collated this obituary for Ole Skovmose.
https://atm.org.uk/write/MediaUploads/Journals/MT296/16.pdf

#MathematicsTeaching #iTeachMath #MathEd #MathsEd #Math #Mathematics #education #design #GraphicDesign #atm #MT #MT296 #photography

Cover of Mathematics Teaching 296, June 2025. The cover is mainly white and is dominated by four photographs of people at the Joint Conference of Mathematical Subject Associations. Top left: an audience applauds a speaker that is outside the picture. Top right: a smiling woman holds an octahedron made of yellow balloons and another woman looks on. Bottom left: people seated at tables look at a woman holding a large piece of paper with writing and drawing on it. Bottom right: a smiling man wears a hat made of red, yellow and purple balloons.

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344d

‘Exploring triangles at the Institute of Mathematics Pedagogy (IMP)’
Tandi Clausen-May reflects on an exploration of 3D shapes made from triangles.

https://atm.org.uk/write/MediaUploads/Journals/MT295/03.pdf

One of the two free articles from Mathematics Teaching 295 for non-members.
#geometry #triangle #helix #polydron #MathematicsTeaching #atm #MT #MT295 #iTeachMath #MathEd #Math #Education #mathematics

Photographs of colourful 3D shapes made from Polydron triangles.
Figure 11. Joining tetrahedra.
Figure 12. Quadruple helix.
Figure 13. One-ribbon triple helix.
Figure 14. Two-ribbon triple helix.

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318d

“The USA Math Olympiad is an extremely challenging math competition for the top US high school students… Hours after it was completed…a team of scientists gave the problems to some of the top large language models, whose mathematical and reasoning abilities have been loudly proclaimed… The results were dismal: None of the AIs scored higher than 5% overall”
—Ernest Davis & Gary Marcus, Reports of LLMs mastering math have been greatly exaggerated
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/reports-of-llms-mastering-math-have
#mathematics #llms #llm #ai

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166d

Mathematics Teaching 297 now available online https://atm.org.uk/Mathematics-Teaching-Journal-Archive/177732

Design by me

Six free articles for non-members:

For the classroom: fractions
Tom Francome offers activities from LUMEN (Loughborough University Mathematics Education Network https://www.lboro.ac.uk/lumen).
https://atm.org.uk/write/MediaUploads/Journals/MT297/08.pdf

Critical mathematics education student teachers’ perspectives
Manjinder K. Jagdev and her student teachers reflect on their experiences of developing critical mathematics education and social justice themes in initial teacher education courses
https://atm.org.uk/write/MediaUploads/Journals/MT297/10.pdf

Awareness of the division of fractions keep your flipping change to yourself!
Sam Brace describes a unit of work that uses learners’ powers of the mind to understand the division of fractions.
https://atm.org.uk/write/MediaUploads/Journals/MT297/11.pdf

Jan Potworowski the quest to humanise mathematics education
George Knights and Lyndon Baker have prepared this tribute to Jan Potworowski.
https://atm.org.uk/write/MediaUploads/Journals/MT297/13.pdf

Julian Williams teacher researcher theorist. 1954–2025
Geoff Wake and Laura Black celebrate Julian Williams’s contribution to mathematics Education.
https://atm.org.uk/write/MediaUploads/Journals/MT297/14.pdf

I want to remember...
In memory of Julian Williams by Laya Hooshyari.
https://atm.org.uk/write/MediaUploads/Journals/MT297/15.pdf

#MathematicsTeaching #iTeachMath #MathEd #MathsEd #Math #Mathematics #teaching #pedagogy #didactics #education #design #GraphicDesign #atm #MT #MT297

Cover of Mathematics Teaching 297, September 2025. The cover is mainly white and is dominated by a composite image. The upper half shows a patterned rug with different representations of 8 × 7 = 56. The lower half has two stylised hands with numbers above the thumbs and some of the fingers: they show how to count from 2 to 56 by counting up in twos.

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147d

https://communitymedia.video/w/rqokDpoYckC42rBoVTd1d1 #archive

#climateCrisis #haiku by @kentpitman

Depressing actual #journalism specific #nz #llm eg (source invidious link as response)

@jns #gopher gopher://gopher.linkerror.com
- gopher://perma.computer
- #warez #history
- #EternalGameEngine
- #unix_surrealism

#lisp #programming
@vnikolov #commonLisp #mathematics #declares
@mdhughes & @dougmerritt @ksaj #automata, in https://gamerplus.org/@screwlisp/115245557313951212

https://lambda.moo.mud.org/

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120d

Mathstodon.xyz is a Mastodon server for people who love mathematics. We have LaTeX rendering in the web interface!

This server has a post size of up to 1729 characters, and has been online since 2017.

https://mathstodon.xyz

You can find out more at https://mathstodon.xyz/about or contact the admin @christianp

#FeaturedServer #Mathematics #Maths #Math #Mastodon #Fediverse #FreeFediverse

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30d

Crows study physics and make fine engineers

#birb #crow #mathematics #engineering

meme of a crow at the classroom window holding a pen, captioned, "a crow tried to go in our classroom and he had a pen" and crow replies "yes hello I am here to learn geometry"

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103d

David G. Wells’ “The Penguin dictionary of curious and interesting…” books are excellent and have been great source of inspiration for me.

They are now are almost 30 years old.

What new entries would you put in these books—either because they’re new after publication, or could have (should have) been included at the time?

#mathematics #geometry #books #bookstodon #askfedi

The Penguin dictionary of curious and interesting numbers. Revised edition.
The cover uses green and blue text on white. The lower third of the cover has a various green numbers on a blue backgroup.

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The Penguin dictionary of curious and interesting geometry (illustrated by John Sharp)
The cover is dominated by an old monochrome stock photograph of a man pulling a face and pointing at a lightbulb that has ‘v + f = e + 2’ written on it.

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The Penguin book of curious and interesting puzzles.
The cover uses green text on white. The lower third of the cover has a various puzzles drawn in white outline on a blue backgroup, e.g. a cubic trefoil knot and a Chinese magic knot.

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$The Penguin book of curious and interesting mathematics. The cover uses green and yellow text on white. The lower third of the cover has a various geometric figures in yellow outline on a blue background, e.g. Dudeney’s square to triangle dissection and a fractal figure.$

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9d

I'm tinkering with an argument based on algorithmic complexity that if it were possible to make something like an "automated mathematician" or "automated scientist", then these would be expected to eventually produce outputs that we humans would be unable to distinguish from random noise.

Getting the whole argument just right is fiddly, but the basic idea is this. You feed some kind of theory into the AM/AS, which is a black box. It churns on this and spits out a result, which is added to the theory (I'm neglecting the case that the result is inconsistent with the theory). It can now churn on theory + result 1. For any given and potentially very large N, after doing this long enough, it's churning on theory + result 1 + result 2 + ... + result N. Whatever it spits out will be dependent in particular on results 1 - N. When N is large enough, unless you know these results you will not be able to understand what it outputs because the output will almost surely depend critically on one or more of results 1 - N. In other words, the output will look like noise to you. If the AM/AS is appreciably faster at producing results than people are at understanding them, there will be an N beyond which no one can understand the output up to that point. It'll become indistinguishable (unable to be distinguished) from random noise.

If you're into software development, this would be analogous to a software system that generates syntactically-correct code and then adds that code as a new call in a growing software library. If you were to run this long enough, virtually all the programs it generated that were short enough for human beings to have any hope of reading and understanding would consist almost entirely of library calls to code generated by the system. You'd have no idea what any of this code did unless you studied the library calls, which you wouldn't be able to do beyond a certain scale. If the system were expanding the library faster than you could read and understand it, there'd be no hope at all.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader whether this is a desirable thing to do and whether it's happened yet. I would offer, though, a question to ponder: what reason is there to believe that a random number generator hooked up to an inscrutable interpreter produces human flourishing, for any given meaning of "human flourishing" you care to use?

#tech #dev #mathematics #AutomatedMathematician #AutomatedScientist #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #ThoughtExperiment

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