My most popular posts are generally the silly ones, like these:
- Headlines from a Mathematically Literate World (reposted at Huffington Post)
- Why Not to Trust Statistics
- Math Experts Split the Check (reprinted in Math Horizons)
- What Does Probability Mean in Your Profession?
- How to Tell a Mathematician You Love Them
- Literature’s Greatest Opening Lines, as Written by Mathematicians
- Mathematicians Explain Sports to Each Other
- If Math Wrote Letters
- Why Are Mathematicians So Bad at Arithmetic?
- A Mathematician’s New Year’s Resolutions
The other class of well-liked posts are essays about education, like these:
- What It Feels Like to Be Bad at Math (reposted at Slate)
- The Math Ceiling: Where’s Your Cognitive Breaking Point? (later adapted for Math Horizons)
- Why Do We Pay Pure Mathematicians?
- The State of Being Stuck
- The Math Major Who Never Reads Math
- Black Boxes (or: Just Say No to Voodoo Formulas)
- Why I’ve Stopped Doing Interviews for Yale
Anyway, those are other people’s favorites. Here are some that I’m particularly fond of:
- The Church of the Right Answer
- A Fight with Euclid (reprinted in At Right Angles)
- Once, There Weren’t Numbers
- The Mathematician’s Haiku Book
- 39 Ways to Love Math
- The Kaufman Decimals
- The Math Aficionado’s Guide to High Fives
- 25 Are Here, and 1 is Not (a tribute to Maryam Mirzakhani)
- A Guide to Mathematical Emotions
Last but not least, there’s the post that remains, four years later, the most popular that I’ve ever done: Ultimate Tic Tac Toe.
I’d like to have a page like this too. How did you create it? Thanks.
I’d guess that he made a normal blog post with links and pictures, then put it on the top menu.
thanks jiffyrohan
Hey, sorry for the delay! I’ve been terrible about comments.
This is a “Page.” There’s a pages menu on your WordPress dashboard. Or you can go to the quick menu in the upper left, choose “New,” and then “Page.”
no problem, thank you.
The Slate link for “You’re Not Stupid, You’re Slow” has changed (grrr, don’t you hate it when they do that) to http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how-i-became-an-unfair-teacher/371908/
I know because I came looking for exactly that sentiment to cheer me up after I stopped trying to keep up with a killer Calc MOOC and decided to go back to the beginning. Thank you as always!
sincerely,
slowpoke
Hmm… I just checked it and the links seem to be directing to the right places. Try it again and let me know if it’s still causing problems?
And good luck with the MOOC! I’m always amazed how much a second time through things can help.
Hi Ben! Love your blog! Do you have any stats specific blogs that you recommend?
Hi. I discovered this page whilst comparing British and American maths/math symbols. What a laugh/gas(?). Please keep it up, I appreciate your humour/humor. Thanks!
Shouldn’t the area of your Sierpinski Carpet be m^log(9)/log(3)?
Ben, this is a beautiful piece. I am sad for you not to have been able to meet this very special woman, surely a mentor.