There has been some talk in the news recently that the security provided by the RSA encryption algorithm isn’t as secure as it used to be.

RSA is an acronym standing for Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman, the […]

A year or so ago I stumbled across Reuben Hersh’s “Under-represented Then Over-represented: A Memoir of Jews in American Mathematics” in the pages of a recent Best Writing on Mathematics volume.

That article […]

A professional mathematician has, through exposure to many trials, become something like a desert creature, capable of supplying “meaning” metabolically by an internal gland rather than imbibing it from without. […]

I was wandering in my neighborhood bookstore this morning, when I came across a new edition of The Greek Myths, by Robert Graves.  Attracted by the cover, and my love of the Claudius series, I decided to bring it […]

Why study mathematics? This is a catechism of mathematics education. The correct answer has something to do with the prevalence of mathematics, its applicability, its beauty, and its power.

What kind of person […]

In every semester there are times when certain topics arise, and anyone now teaching (or enrolled in) Calc II must be dealing with infinite series.

Two things I like to present are Leibniz’s “arithmetic […]

Last week when I was trying to sort out a combinatorial question related to my research, I accidentally ended up redoing some fun geometry of the type covered (?) in an undergraduate discrete math, or intro to […]

The feelings that I associate with Quaternions (which I will persist in capitalizing, as an homage to their 19th century origins) are not really professional. I see them as a Victorian curiosity; the kind of thing […]