Highlights

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.