Math news: Reporters
So if the only math news is what you find if you google “math” or look it up on YouTube, then the topic is the best math reporters.
Okay — here’s an issue I’m having. How do I make sure each day’s “report” is fresh? I mean, was it yesterday when I did a thing about the one-half-plus-seven rule for dating … That was not fresh. That was just old, that was boring for me to write, because it was me writing an OLD story. So somehow, I want to make sure I’m not mining something I find old and boring.
Although, maybe that’s what writing IS, to some extent; it’s pausing and reflecting on and recording some stuff that already happened; it puts you out of the present moment and back into the past as you relate whatever it was that happened, or what it was that you wanted to have happen, or that you imagined could have happened. That’s right, I’m saying that even relating fictional events is probably in some way relating past events. I guess maybe it’s different for some writers. Maybe as they take up their pen or their keyboard, the ideas come out onto the page just right out of that edge that is the present; maybe that’s what’s happening to me right now?!
That sounds alright.
Anyway, I had a conversation with a guy I used to hang with; he’s a math tutor, and I had talked to him over the summer about a tutoring job that I thought maybe I was going to have. We were talking about what kind of math tutoring opportunities might be created by this pandemic, this global shelter-in-place. Today we were continuing the conversation; we were talking about various math Youtube channels. And I recommended to him mathalicious.com, which, I now realize, is where I got that one-half-plus-seven math lesson back in 2013. They have a lot of cool lesson plans relating math to real-world things, or cool things like video games or sports.
Anyway, we sort of talked about the math YouTube world — where obviously there’s Khan Academy, but then also there patrickjmt, he has a thousand videos up at least. Then I’m like, “oh there’s that fine girl Nancy Pi,” who I thought I should just turn today’s little journal entry into an ode to the beautiful Nancy Pi, who teaches math while wearing tanktops so that her beautiful brown hair can cascade down over those shoulders to devastating effect. But she hasn’t really been making any videos for the last couple years.
Then there’s Socratica, which I found really useful for Abstract Algebra; and then of course the amazing Grant from 3Blue1Brown, which is just about the best site for visualizations of mathematical concepts. Both of those last two are pretty advanced; the first three are better for high school students. Mathalicious is best for high school teachers.
Anyway, I guess this is just a big ol’ link dump, so I might as well add one more that actually surfaced today. Mad With Bad Drawings, which I used to visit a lot more five years ago but I hadn’t been to lately; I’m glad to see it’s still up and going strong. It resurfaced (in my life) because I wanted to explain to somebody the amazing game of Ultimate Tic Tac Toe, for with MWBD has a pretty good explainer.
