It’s a Tuesday night, and you’ve just remembered that you have a huge algebra 2 test tomorrow. Panic starts to sweep over you as you think back on all you’ve learned this semester. How will you ever succeed? You call up your friend to ask how you can study, and he calmly tells you he has just spent about an hour reviewing the main concepts from the unit, and he feels confident about the test. The question, then, is what is his secret?

There is a humorous, misguided stigma associated with math. Just the mere utterance of the word “math” conjures up, for many, the image of intimidating, arcane equations strewn about blackboards and calculators gone on the fritz. For many, math was a painful experience in grade school (and beyond) -- myself included! In fact, I did not become interested in pursuing a math major until my sophomore year of college. The purpose of this post is not to philosophize on the state of mathematics curriculum in America’s schools, but rather, to explain how I eventually saw meaning beneath the seemingly endless exercises.

SAT, ACT, SSAT, ISEE, GRE. What do these acronyms all have in common? Well, they’re all standardized tests, but more importantly, they all have multiple-choice math test sections. Despite whether or not they’re accurate indicators of student performance in the classroom, lab, or office, they are all essential for entry into some educational career path. So whether you want to be a lawyer or you want to get into a STEM-focused private high school, it helps to do well in a standardized, timed math test to get there. 

You’ve heard it before. Or you’ve said it. I’m not good at math.

I hear it from seventh graders struggling with fractions, high school students preparing to take the SAT, friends at a restaurant when splitting a check, and even from parents assuring me that their child’s own difficulties are in fact genetic.

And while I’ve heard it countless times, I’ve never actually met a student who was unable to improve their math skills. 

Don’t let the word “matrix” scare you off! Even if your only experience with them is from the movie The Matrix, you know enough to learn about how they can be used to recommend you movies you might like, including, if you haven’t seen it already, The Matrix.  Today, we'll go over matrix factorization by taking a look at Netflix!

Equations in math are useful but they’re also kind of inefficient – for each x value, you have to do a separate calculation to figure out what y is. Graphs take that equation and turn it into a visual, something you can look at and immediately see what happens at different values of x, how the function changes, and more!

Math has changed a lot over the years. When most people think of math, they likely think of someone sitting quietly at a desk with a book or some paper. It’s an unmoving image. When we think of people who are good at math, we conjure up people who blaze through problems quickly and alone. They follow the rules in math and in life.

All shapes, from strings to bridges to carrots, resonate

You’re having breakfast in the kitchen when you start to hear a series of slow and repetitive thuds – someone is coming down the stairs. Without having to ask or look up, you can instinctively guess who it is. That’s because the cadence and volume of one’s footsteps is unique from person to person, depending in a significant way on the geometry of their gait and body structure. Of course, it isn’t too surprising to suggest that geometry and sound are interrelated; you can hear the difference between strings of different thicknesses and drums of different widths. The shapes of these instruments affect the frequencies they resonate at.

Let’s talk about a concept that can be confusing when you’re first studying calculus: limits. When you’re first introduced to limits, you’ll often hear your professor say things like,
“What is the limit of f(x) =  as x approaches 5?”

When worded like that, limits don’t sound very natural or intuitive – but in today’s post, I’m going to convince you that limits are a very natural way of looking at the world. I’ll also go over some examples of limits that we can solve without doing any “math” at all!

If you’re the parent of a teenager, chances are good that a few years have passed since you had to graph a polynomial or find a derivative. Since high school math covers topics that people working outside of STEM don’t come across very often, many parents don’t feel like they can give much help to their teenage children with their math homework. But you’re an adult who solves problems every day! You have a lot to offer your teenage student about how to approach problems productively, utilize resources, and access their own abilities.