Category: Other mathematics

This morning, I was reading the NCTM blog, and the subject was on students struggling with systems of linear inequalities. First, as background: I don’t h...

As a high school teacher, I struggle routinely with getting students to understand that \(x/0\) is undefined. Students don’t seem to understand that divis...

I was working through the November problems for NCTM’s Mathematics Teacher. There’s a problem on converting between bases, which led to me developin...

Generally speaking, if \(a \times b = c\), then \(a\) and \(b\) are factors of \(c\). This concept appears at the secondary level in two contexts: The factors o...

One of the questions my mind keeps returning to is: What is a number? I don’t mean this in a high-level set theory way. I’m not talking about aleph-...

One of the challenges that I see with students learning mathematics is their confusion with what qualifies as the content of mathematics and the language of mat...

The easiest way to find a square root in this technological age is to use a calculator. That’s a fine method if what you want to do is simply calculate a ...

The Pythagorean Theorem states that, given a right triangle, the areas of squares placed along the two legs will have the same area as a square placed on the hy...

I’m currently reading Howard Eves’s Great Moments in Mathematics After 1650 (1983, Mathematical Association of America), a chronological collection ...

I’ve had two recent thoughts about the fourth dimension. The first relates to Euler’s Formula, which says that the difference between the sum of the...