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In #mathstoday (last week) we investigated several datasets. Students generated data questions, including one about what makes YouTube videos more popular. This plot made for a lot of great discussions about causation! #ITeachMath #mtbos

All robots have simple things they struggle with. This includes software chatbots. But in the real world robots fall over and break. In software we just run it again and again until we get an output we like and then forget all the work we put in to correct bad results and call it revolutionary.

In #MathsToday (tomorrow) we are looking at the results of the 2025 Rubik’s WCA World Championship. All of my Data Science students know how to solve a Rubik's cube (it was our first assignment), so they emotionally invested in these tournaments 🤣. We'll look at rankings using different averages.

December 2025 through February 2026 was the 2nd warmest winter on record for the Contiguous U.S. according to Prism climate data. The widespread record to near record warmth in the west easily outweighed the cool temps in the east. 🔥🔥🔥

The March Calendar of Problems is here! Enjoy some #ProblemSolving yourself or with students. Let us know your thoughts & working-out here or on post. #MTBoS #iTeachMath #T3Learns #RecreationalMath #MathSky #MathsToday karendcampe.wordpress.com/2026/03/01/m...

The 7yo looking out the window as we are driving. 7yo: "The moon is moving so fast!" Me: "Actually, parallax is..." 7yo: "Ooooh you don't think 2300 miles per hour is fast?!"

In #MathsToday we read Chapter 3: Arms Race - Going to College, from Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil. Students annotated, discussed in groups, and will share some reflections in writing.

Honestly, this is the kind of organic messaging @prisonculture.bsky.social was talking about earlier. We don't have to wait for the media to take up these issues on their own. Make it all about these issues.

I had one of these beautiful shapes hanging in my old classroom for years! Tangent: this picture was the data from a pendulum lab. I ask students to: 1. Measure the period of a pendulum 2. Measure 10 swings then divide by 10 3. Measure 10 swings again, but this time do a good job Never fails.

A text that is great for #GuessTheYear! "The notion that we understand how mental capacities develop well enough to dare to control their development is not just an exaggeration; it is a pack of nonsense, and we rely on it at our students' peril." #mtbos #ITeachMath #NCTM

Normalize laughing derisively in men's faces when they deserve it.

Really stretching hard to make the math jokes work in this chapter on Number...

Teachers are great. Had an awesome PD day today. Every teacher there was simply a generous kind-hearted person dedicating a career to encouraging and supporting young people in exploring their interests, doing their best, and leading happy lives.

In today’s #404DeepDive, @jasonkoebler.bsky.social gets into Ring’s new feature Search Party which was advertised at the Super Bowl which essentially turns the entire neighborhood into a security dragnet. Read more: www.404media.co/with-ring-am...

I think learning/teaching is about the dance between explicit understanding and our implicit habits, and I think this is confusing, and I think this is also what's confusing about being a person more generally. pershmail.substack.com/p/understand...

In #MathsToday we found sums by creating sequences with NumPy.

In #MathsToday we explored the palmer penguins data set from allisonhorst.github.io/palmerpengui... and did some manual feature engineering.

Time for winter #ProblemSolving! Here's the February Calendar of Problems for you and your students. Tell us your working out here or on the post. ENJOY! #MTBoS #iTeachMath #RecreationalMath #MathSky #MathsToday #T3Learns karendcampe.wordpress.com/2026/02/01/f...

In class yesterday I was talking about heat transfer & I mentioned electro-magnetic energy. I then spent around 20 minutes answering fantastic eager questions about the EM spectrum, particle-wave duality, frequency and color, human physiology and perception, etc. And I didn't even make any of it up!

One superpower #math gives me is the ability to picture an interesting object in my head, spark up #Mathematica, and within a few minutes figure out how to make it "real." It's intoxicating! (code in ALT)

"It's just really important for anyone who is using a computer to do mathematics to understand that [chatbots] are not computation engines and we really shouldn't treat them like that." "Nobody should be doing their taxes with ChatGPT 🤣" #ITeachMath #mtbos #AIinEducation #AIeducation #AIedu

In #MathsToday, we continued solving linear systems both at whiteboards and with NumPy, and there were several wonderful breakthroughs in understanding! We saw the first steps of Gaussian elimination (without yet naming it) and one great reaction was "wait you can just solve any matrix you want"

In #MathsToday we solved systems of equations with row operations in NumPy. I did this in MATLAB for many years and don't like the NumPy syntax... but it went well! #ITeachMath #mtbos #ComputingInMath

The message I tried to bring to this discussion was: IF there is a way to responsibly incorporate #AI into math education, we definitely aren't doing it... #ITeachMath #mtbos #AIinEducation #AIedu

New #DebateMath on AI in Math Education! It was a privilege to largely agree with Cal and Ed. My opening remarks: We have a professional responsibility as educators to vet technologies we bring into the classroom. Unfortunately, that’s largely *not* happening.

Got to give a guest lecture on AI to a Science Ethics course! Students had fantastic questions. One that stuck out: "How is all this legal?"

The number of players on @chess.com who abandon games without resigning has skyrocketed in the past few weeks. Tried to leave feedback but got the chat bot that told me to clear my browser cache. Thanks AI!

“i want back my rocking chairs, / solipsist sunsets, / & coastal jungle sounds...” A poem by Renee Nicole Good, who was murdered by ICE earlier today. lithub.com/renee-nicole...

In #MathsToday we modeled a tide. Part (e) led to some amazing passionate mathematical arguments! (e) Our model has four parameters. Could you still model the tide well enough with only three?

Only January 1 and 1998 NCTM is already being saucy!

Looking forward to a #TechFreeJanuary in the classroom to start the new year (with exception for Data Science which was largely tech free up to now). #ITeachMath #mtbos

"Iterating Linear Functions—An Introduction to Dynamical Systems" 1997 Jonathan Choate and (edited by) @hpicciotto.bsky.social If students are going to understand machine learning, they should start with iteration and fundamentals of dynamical systems. #MathEdPaperOfTheWeek #mtbos #ITeachMath

I gave a talk in 2024 called "Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions: How AI Predictably Fails Unpredictably". A dope title! jedediyah.github.io/aapt2024/ In examples of AI failing where we shouldn't be using AI, I highlighted a behavior nobody should be surprised by: AI encouraging suicide.

another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

In #MathsToday we did one of my favorite activities: Regression by Hand. Our goal is to model the bounce height h_bounce of a bouncy ball dropped from height h_drop. #mtbos #ITeachMath

Clay letters from ancient Mesopotamia are alive with idiom, sayings, and everyday language that I love. Here are just a few random ones so you can enjoy them too.

In #MathsToday we are playing and analyzing Hexapawn as an introduction to machine learning. You can play and have a machine play itself here: jedediyah.github.io/hexapawn/ There are two problem sets here: williams-bhs.github.io/docs/hexapaw...

I am a proud recipient of this year's MTLT Outstanding Reviewer award! So that's nice.

"AI tools that result in discrimination based on race, gender, age, or disability" So... basically any AI, right?

A now well-known-ish open conjecture! One reason that the tetrahedron problem is tougher is that the triangle inequality on each side is necessary but NOT sufficient. To see a deeper reason for the difficulty, the condition on a tetrahedron involves the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cayley%... #iTeachMath

A classic probability problem: Given a stick broken randomly at two places, what is the probability that a triangle can be formed by the three pieces. There are various proofs of the answer, but we used this last week to demonstrate Monte Carlo approaches to finding probability distributions.

The @internetofbugs.com videos are always good. Doing the work of simple fact checking of AI hype. "Unlike the SciShow team, I'm just one guy, and it certainly doesn't help when the channels like SciShow that do have the resources to make things better, choose to make things worse instead."

[New Post] Ontario Math Links - My favourite #math related links from this week: ontariomath.blogspot.com/2025/11/math... Links and help from @davidporas.bsky.social @howiehua.bsky.social @infobeautiful.bsky.social @jedediyah.com and more #MathChat #MTBoS #iTeachMath

Shared a Thanksgiving gift with my data science students today! I spend a couple months collecting used copies. Next month we will read chapter 3 Arms Race and reflect on feedback systems and the susceptibility and sensitivity of data models to manipulation.

Last week we worked on combinatorics and I asked about the weight of a binary word. In #MathsToday we worked on random walks and I asked what is the probability of ending where we started. Some of the students used the weight solution to find the probability! 🥳 #mtbos #ITeachMath

"Have you ever been a reader? I think I want to try to be a reader. I might get some books this weekend." Overheard today 📖

In #MathsToday we rolled a lot of dice and found estimates of probability mass functions for sums of n=2,3 4 dice. In #MathsNextWeek we start to explore broken stick problems! Draft of next week's guide: williams-bhs.github.io/docs/Broken_...

In #MathsToday, we saw some amazing and diverse approaches to this problem: Using the optimal strategy in "Guess my number from 1 to 100" (where we get feedback "higher" or "lower"), what is the average number of guesses it will take as more games are played?