Maybe you were told you’re not a math person Maybe it felt pointless, or impossible, or maybe both? Maybe it felt like there were too many rules to remember, or not enough Maybe you got tired of being marked down for all those pesky details: forgetting a negative sign, rounding to the wrong…

This is the fourth in a series of articles exploring why math is often so adamantly avoided, and why I think it’s worth playing with anyway. One of the driving factors of math anxiety is the fear of doing it wrong. The fear of making mistakes. And it’s understandable given…

This is the third in a series of articles exploring why math is often so adamantly avoided, and why I think it’s worth playing with anyway. When I walked into my advisor’s office after my first term of college saying I wanted to switch my major to math, a gentle…

This is the second in a series of articles exploring why math is often so adamantly avoided, and why I think it’s worth playing with anyway. In our last chat, we discussed the need to interact with math differently. That requires a significant paradigm shift in how we perceive math…

This is the first in a series of articles exploring why math is often so adamantly avoided, and why I think it’s worth playing with anyway. The Societal Narrative When I was in elementary school and I’d get that inevitable question, “what’s your favorite subject?”, my response was often “math”. At first, I…

This is the third article in So You Think You Can Count: A Series on Combinatorics. Every field of math seems to have it’s own fundamental principle or theorem. We have the fundamental theorem of arithmetic (every integer greater than 1 can be uniquely expressed as a product of primes)…

We live in a base 10 (decimal) world, but that’s not the only way to represent numbers. In fact, computers operate purely in base 2 (binary) and many cultures have traditionally used other bases for their written number systems as well. There are a couple key components of any number…

This is the second article in So You Think You Can Count: A Series on Combinatorics. It’s early in the morning. It’s cold. It’s dark. You want to put on some socks but you’re definitely not ready to turn the lights on yet. You know there are three colors of…

This is the first in a series of articles focused on combinatorics. When I first took a discrete math course in college, I jokingly told my friends that here I was, a math major, learning how to count. Honestly though, I don’t know of a better way to describe combinatorics…