Stories by Evelyn Lamb

The topologist's sine curve is a classic example of a space that is connected but not path connected: you can see the finish line, but you can't get there from here.

Need some summer reading? How to Bake Pi by Eugenia Cheng and The Proof and the Pudding by Jim Henle show us that math and cooking have more in common than you might think.

Spherical geometry: it's part of this complete breakfast.

Last month, I wrote about the Cantor set, a mathematical space that is an interesting mix of small and large. It's small in the sense that its length is 0.

Two math communicators talk about how they got interested in math and how they share their enthusiasm with others

For Math Poetry Month, a poem about fractals

The history of hyperbolic geometry is filled with hyperbolic quotes, and I came across a beautiful one earlier this semester in my math history class.

When you're looking at it, it just stays there, constant and still. But if you turn your back for just an instant at a point in the Cantor set, the function grows impossibly quickly.

The Cantor set is huge, but there isn't very much there.

Continued fractions are objectively the best in approximation technology

Transcend decimals as you celebrate this transcendental number

So it's cold and rainy, and you're up a little too late trying to figure out why that one pesky assumption is necessary in a theorem. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just order up a space that was path connected but not locally connected?

Sometimes you want to learn a “new” multiplication algorithm from a general interest math book, sometimes you want to learn why voting systems are doomed to imperfection, and sometimes you just want to play with numbers, patterns, and pictures.

We should not let portrayals of "genius" mathematicians keep the rest of us out of mathematics.

The basic reproduction number and why it matters

Last semester, I began my math history class with some Babylonian arithmetic. The mathematics we were doing was easy—multiplying and adding numbers, solving quadratic equations by completing the square—but the base 60 system and the lack of a true zero made those basic operations challenging for my students.

I had the pleasure of attending the 2nd annual Heidelberg Laureate Forum in September. Modeled after the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings, it brings together recipients of prestigious awards in mathematics and computer science and young researchers in those areas.

I had the pleasure of attending the 2nd annual Heidelberg Laureate Forum in September. Modeled after the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings, it brings together recipients of prestigious awards in mathematics and computer science and young researchers in those areas.

It’s the season for family, hot chocolate, and year-in-review lists. Guess which one this is! Roots of Unity has been around for two years now, and I’m so glad I have a place to share some of the weird and wonderful math I think about.

For Halloween, I wrote about a very scary topic: higher homotopy groups. Homotopy is an idea in topology, the field of math concerned with properties of shapes that stay the same no matter how you squish or stretch them, as long as you don’t tear them or glue things together.

Now is your chance to prove some theorems without knowing what they mean! Chris Staecker, a mathematician at Fairfield University, created the game Nice Neighbors to get crowd-sourced solutions to problems from a field called digital topology.

I wrote a post yesterday about the missing fundamental effect. It’s a startling auditory illusion in which your brain hears a note that is lower than any of the notes that are actually playing.

Telephones lie about sounds because odd numbers aren't even. Once again with those integers and sound perception! Telephones can only pick up frequencies above 300 or 400 Hertz (cycles per second, also called Hz), but most adults’ speaking voices are lower than 300 Hz (approximately the D above middle C).

We can't tune pianos because prime numbers