## E. Graham Evans

When I graduated from the University of Illinois in 2004, the math department’s commencement address was given by Dr. E. Graham Evans. He was retiring that year, so he forged a bond with his audience by also being on his way… Continue Reading

## A Near Miss

Recently, I was working with my son on some of his Beast Academy homework on tangrams. Tangrams are a set of seven tiles (5 triangles of 3 different sizes along with a square and a parallelogram) that can be arranged to… Continue Reading

## Puffy Triangles

A few months ago, I was working on a lesson on sectors of circles. A sector of a circle is a piece of it cut off by slicing along two radiuses from the center. There is a formula for the… Continue Reading

## Countdown

In 7th grade, I was a student at Fredericktown Middle School in the eponymous town northwest of Columbus, OH. Any time a lesson finished a bit early, my math teacher would call two students up to the front of the room… Continue Reading

## Keyword Ciphers

A keyword cipher is a way of encoding hidden messages. To use it, the sender and receiver agree on some keyword, and then keep it a secret from everyone else. When the sender has a message to send, she first writes… Continue Reading

## A Mathematician Solves a Maze

A couple weeks ago, I was at a Cub Scout event with my son. Each of us had a placemat with, among other things, a maze on it. I approached the maze like I, as a mathematician, approach most problems:… Continue Reading

## A Mathematician Ties a Tie

I learned to tie a tie before I became a mathematician. I was still just a kid when I learned. My grandparents taught me to make a basic Windsor knot. I could get that part right, but the length would invariably be… Continue Reading

## Self-Diagram

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across this gem of a geometry problem from an old MATHCOUNTS exam: The intersection of a circular region of radius $3$ inches and a circular region of radius $2$ inches has area $\pi$ square… Continue Reading

## Happy Approximation to Pi Day!

March 14 is one of my least favorite days of the year. While most math teachers revel in Pi Day, I spend my 3/14s frustrated that we waste an opportunity to pay homage to one of the most important numbers in… Continue Reading

## Square Sum Puzzles

A couple nights ago, my son was finishing up his nightly Beast Academy and enjoying the puzzles so much that he took his workbook with him at bedtime and continued to work for another hour! He was in a section of… Continue Reading