New video! Continuing with the theme of generating primes in unexpected ways, we explore the recurrence R(n) = R(n - 1) + gcd(n, R(n - 1)). It was conjectured to generate primes in 2003, and I proved this a few years later. Animated with @manim_community youtube.com/watch?v=OpaKpz…

Is it surprising that students don’t understand what it means to cite their sources when their textbooks contain problems like this with no attribution whatsoever?

Just realized that the journal Discrete Mathematics got rid of page numbers three years ago and started numbering articles instead. Definitely a step in the right direction! I haven't looked at a physical journal in over a decade. sciencedirect.com/journal/discre…

Seeing students replace f(a + h) with f a + f h makes me realize that parens are pretty badly overloaded notation... a(b + c) = a b + a c but somehow when you change the letters the rule no longer applies? Hoping it's not too late in the history of math to fix this 😂

This explanation of vowel space by @geofflindsey is one of the best educational videos I've seen this year youtube.com/watch?v=FdldD0…

What’s a better name for Precalculus? Students have no reason to be interested in something called Pre-X if they aren’t going to take X. Instead of saying what the course isn’t, shouldn’t the title say what it is?

LIRR guy just punched my train ticket with a pen #budgetcuts

This month's Ponder This challenge is about a familiar sequence research.ibm.com/haifa/ponderth…

I started my Logic & Probability course this semester with this scene from Labyrinth and trying to figure out whether Sarah's question is enough to tell which door is which. Later on we'll discuss Monty Hall. Is it a coincidence that both involve doors? youtube.com/watch?v=2dgmgu…

I gave a talk yesterday about a major thread of my research over the last 10 years: taking integer sequences that count combinatorial objects and asking what they look like when we reduce them modulo a prime or prime power. youtu.be/ZCIGJwxYqkk

Symphonie fantastique: when one tuba just isn't enough youtu.be/5HgqPpjIH5c?t=…

In math you can define objects however you want. But if your definitions aren’t *right*, the theorems will let you know. I’ve been working on a paper for two years, and today my coauthor and I redefined one of the main objects… Lots of little problems we were having disappeared!

To estimate the variance of a distribution from n sample points, we divide by n-1 rather than n. This always drove me crazy. Why n-1 when it's an average over n points!? Finally there's a great explanation, thanks to a new video by Luis Serrano youtu.be/_sdNwY0KKUA

Raise your hand if you want to see a live session with Eric Rowland and myself, where we'll talk about math and answer all your questions! And if you're not following his awesome math channel yet, take a look at it here, you're in for a treat! youtube.com/@EricRowland

Really? Which is it? NY Times, July 23: "A.I. can write poetry, but it struggles with math" nytimes.com/2024/07/23/tec… NY Times, July 25: "A.I. is getting good at math — and might soon make a worthy collaborator for humans" nytimes.com/2024/07/25/sci…

New video–paper combo! What numbers do you get when you iteratively scale a table? Approximations have been used since the 1930s to predict telephone traffic and in other applications. But mathematically, the exact values are extremely complicated! youtu.be/-uIwboK4nwE