Stories by Evelyn Lamb

Looking for a gift that says, "Hey, I know you like math"? Look no further. There is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to wonderful mathematical things to give to people, but here are some of the coolest items I've seen this year.

This proof of the math fact of Rolle, I wrote it down; here was my goal: Use just words with one part. (So it won’t sound too smart.) Please tell me if you find a hole.

Enter the world of 3-dimensional holes in 2-dimensional objects.

My math history class is currently studying non-Euclidean geometry, which means we've studied quite a few "proofs" of Euclid's fifth postulate, also known as the parallel postulate.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international celebration of women in science, technology, engineering, and math. If you’d like to read about women in math for the occasion, you're in serious danger of coming across an article about Hypatia, Emmy Noether, Sophie Germain, or Sofia Kovalevskaya.

Later this month, people will be gathering at museums and schools around the world to build giant Menger sponges as part of a global fractal extravaganza called MegaMenger.

The world's favorite number is seven, at least if the result of a poll conducted by Alex Bellos is to be believed. Some people like it because it is prime, some because they have a lot of sevens in their birthdates.

Samuel Arbesman recently wrote about incorrect mathematical conjectures. I wanted to add one of my favorites, which came up in my math history class a couple weeks ago.

Believe it or not, I do have friends who would describe themselves as not liking math, and every so often one of them will share this meme on Facebook: And then Satan said, "Put the alphabet in math." There are different background pictures each time the meme pops up, but the text is always the [...]

Evelyn Boyd Granville was one of the first African American women to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics. She recently turned 90, and I wrote a post here to celebrate.

The surprising difficulties of ancient Mesopotamian arithmetic

If you don't know what to do, do something. That's one of my mottos when I teach math (and it's probably good life advice too). Last year, I taught introductory analysis (basically calculus with the juicy bits left in), one of the first proof-oriented classes students take.

I'll be teaching a math history class for the first time this semester. I'm excited to be teaching it, but I've noticed that preparing for this class has been very different from preparing for other classes I've taught, which have all been math content courses.

On Wednesday, four mathematicians will receive the prestigious Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Seoul.

In the course of being a math person on Twitter, I have run across some math-related Twitter bots and feeds. It would just be mean to grade my human tweeps, but I have no qualms about rating the bots!

I spent about a month in the UK earlier this summer, and that meant I took a lot of train trips. I love riding trains: the feeling of endless possibility I get when I look at the departure boards, the countryside rolling by, the fantastic people-watching, the two-hour delay between Edinburgh and Manchester because a [...]

Warning: contains minor spoilers for The Fault in Our Stars. I recently read The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, now a major motion picture that has led to theft in Amsterdam and a shortage of dry eyes in movie theaters around the world.

As I wrap up a trip to the UK, I reflect on the many objects of constant width I encountered here. 

"Now and then we pluck numbers from the blur...numbers which have no names except the ones we might now give them...souvenirs from alien, unknowable worlds." -Really Big Numbers by Richard Evan Schwartz Really Big Numbers by Richard Schwartz, a mathematician at Brown University, is the first children’s book published by the American Mathematical Society.

Whether you write it 6/28 or 28/6, today is a perfect day. A perfect number is a number that is the sum of its factors besides itself, and 6 (1+2+3) and 28 (1+2+4+7+14) are the first two perfect numbers.

Last month, I wrote about group theory via monkeys, and it got me thinking about the associative property. A mathematical group consists of a collection of stuff: integers, or rational numbers, or even something more abstract; and an operation that combines any two elements of your stuff into another element of stuff.

What does math taste like? Andrea Hawksley recently posted a recipe for Fibonacci lemonade, a drink that is inspired by the famous Fibonacci sequence: 1,1,2,3,5,8, and so on.

How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg. Image courtesy of Penguin Press. How Not to Be Wrong, the first popular math book by University of Wisconsin-Madison math professor Jordan Ellenberg, just hit the shelves.

Today on the radio, I heard an announcer say, “Chicago has a higher murder rate than New York and Los Angeles combined.” The compassionate human being in me cringed, and the statistical pedant in me also cringed.