From the earliest days, mathematics has typically received a hallowed treatment from those who have studied it. Plato, who studied a special set of five three-dimensional shapes now known as the Platonic solids, wrote that one of these, the dodecahedron, was used by the gods “for arranging the constellations on the whole of heaven.”
Posts published in “For Math’s Sake”
This past week, I began reading The Maniac, a fictionalized biography of John von Neumann. While von Neumann is perhaps lesser known than some of his contemporaries — Albert Einstein, J.
The inspiration for this column comes not from the epic 1999 film The Matrix, as the title may suggest, but from an episode of Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast that I listened to over the summer.
Last week, I was invited to speak at the induction ceremony of Stevens’ chapter of Pi Mu Epsilon, the national mathematics honors society.
Following the harrowing attacks by Hamas against Israel on October 7, 2023, as Israel’s violent military response in Gaza began in earnest, I wrote a For Math’s Sake column describing the difficulties of doing math in dangerous times, and also, the further difficulties math can present in these times.
In a few days after publication for this article, I will be giving my proposal defense to share initial progress on my PhD research with my doctoral advisory committee.
Despite potentially inducing some stark emotional whiplash vis-à-vis my Valentine’s Day column, I feel the need to write about the egregious mathematical errors being made by President Donald Trump and his legally tenuous Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, run by Elon Musk.
The first time I had a column in the Valentine’s Day issue, I covered the mathematics of love; for this year’s issue, I thought it fitting to write about the love of mathematics.
I recently read a feature interview in Quanta Magazine of physicist Rithya Kunnawalkam Elayavalli, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who studies the formation of protons and neutrons from their elementary constituents, the quarks and gluons.
For the last For Math’s Sake column of the semester, I interviewed fellow mathematics PhD student Marissa Whitby. Completing her undergraduate studies at Towson University in Maryland, Marissa now works in Professor Kathrin Smetana’s research group, and has previously been a teaching assistant for many mathematics courses at Stevens.