MIT Professor Steven Pinker made a statement that has stuck with me. He observed that math is “ruthlessly cumulative” (1997). Phil Daro expanded on this by noting that, when studying history, you can surely learn a great deal about World […]

Earlier this month, I attended the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) conference in San Francisco with nearly 9,000 math educators. At a math conference, you would expect the emphasis to be on numbers, but in many ways, NCTM […]

The Romanian men’s soccer team gets it. Mathematics is both a systematic and social enterprise. In order to get Romanian children excited about math, and to address the 20% dropout rate among high school students, the Romanian soccer team substituted […]