"sin^2 φ is odious to me, even though Laplace made use of it; should it be feared that sin φ^2 might become ambiguous, which would... occur... at most very rarely when speaking of sin(φ^2), well then, let us write (sin φ)^2, but not sin^2 φ, which by analogy should signify sin(sin φ)" -- Gauss

Very nice morning trip to the Dunes. I always love these kinds of outings, where we pretty much have the place to ourselves.

Corrupted save file, have to start over, this sucks!

7yo is finally learning to play Everdell. She's been asking for a while and we finally have the time.

Dilla Donuts is the definitive "make my brain not a bad brain" album

🚨 THE DOMINCAN REPUBLIC HAS A HOME RUN JACKET🧥⚾️🇩🇴🚨

In Chicago, that man is Jeff Pagliocca. #WNBA

This is who runs this account.

I love him so much, I would die for Osty (I mean not actually, it's literally the other way around)

Slay the Spire 2's multiplayer is even better than the modded one from the original!

who wants to buy me slay the spire 2

Even the president of the NBPA is just one member, and he is beholden to the membership. But if FVV's position is widely held, and union is willing to make fighting gambling partnerships a priority, that would be really interesting. (Colour me skeptical about the priority part.) Good piece on FVV

The two opposite extremes are both pretty disheartening.

In happier news, I am working with a student to figure out how to have them finish the last bit of our semester remotely because THEY GET TO SPEND THE SUMMER WORKING IN A NATIONAL PARK and have to leave a bit before the semester ends! So cool.

Tear it all down, remove these people from society, raze the data centers, and salt the ground. Let us never see this kind of depravity in our world.

It's gonna be a busy email day. Love to send messages back and forth. Lemme mark this urgent. Oh, I gotta CC someone on this? Bet. Out here farming those react-replies. This message originated from an external email system? No problem, I'm in an email day, these warnings won't scare me.

Breanna Stewart ruining as much as she can in the span of days, if not hours.

Yikes.

Samsung, please, just use normal cameras in slightly different positions and lie to us about them being phones, I can't watch this through a terrible phone camera! #Unrivaled

A big part of the job is just constantly and gently teaching students that "studying" should probably be different than "listen/watch a lecture." This isn't a dunk on students, just a note that a lot of students (myself included) have never really learned how to support their own learning at home!

The data-collection machine is going to collect a bit more data while it pushes you into a mental health crisis.

I wrote about the story of the Four Color Theorem that I remember being told and Terence Tao and generative AI and some of my thoughts on teaching. www.peter-keep.com/2026-03-02-f...

Good morning, I hope Christian conservatives in this country are having a terrible time and feeling crushed by guilt and shame, and for everyone else I hope you get to experience something nice today!

I give up on the scan for now, forgot what a nightmare this blue is to match but please enjoy this photo of my new drawing: elliptic curve cryptography (下山虎）

I wrote about the story of the Four Color Theorem that I remember being told and Terence Tao and generative AI and some of my thoughts on teaching. www.peter-keep.com/2026-03-02-f...

are there known instances of cultures with a right-to-left script drawing number lines/coordinate grids backward from the usual convention, i.e positive on the left & negative on the right? wikipedia tells me europeans first invented these, but did they get flipped when imported elsewhere? #MathSky

Next week is my Spring Break and so I'm gonna need to distract myself, time to learn PreFigure? I was hoping to make that a summer project, but this might be a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency situation

I was cleaning up old browser tabs on my phone and one of them was a Google search for "What makes people happy?" Pour one out for past-Peter, he was really going through it. (If you know the answer, you know, just to make sure we're thinking of the same thing, just like, tell me what it is...)

Someone claimed that you cannot crave something that you've not experienced before. It feels like this is a super limited view, and doesn't match my experience at all! Is there a difference between craving and some other feeling that's similar that I'm just missing?

It's finally here! "Linear Optimization: A Geometric Inquiry Course" gives an inquiry based course in linear optimization supplemented by technology for intuition building. A great class for interests in either pure or applied math! Physical Copies now on sale: www.619wreath.com/store/p53/Li...

The best time to shame the college board out of existence was a while ago, the second best time to shame the college board out of existence is now.

Making progress on this piece, won’t be much longer now. This drawing is about the awesome power of polynomials at approximating things, can you spot it?

👀

Call me a raving radical but I literally do not care whether your imperialist massacre of children is “constitutional” or not.

A year later and the restorative power of watching woodpeckers and blue jays and chickadees play in the trees is still relevant.

My college is manufacturing consent to push more AI on us. My board of trustees is removing DEI from our mission statement and ending committees and taskforces connected to DEI. My country is happily supporting an international genocide and domestic fascism. This isn't how it's supposed to be.

How do you all make progress on anything when nothing matters compared to the everyday actions of this ghoulish country? How do you wake up and write or draw or practice or try anything other than sit in horror and despair?

Does anyone have a (link to a) good broad-audience piece on the Four Color Theorem? Looking for a mix of history, some discussion about the initial computer-assisted proof, and then explanation of the time afterwards as mathematicians kept trying to prove it. #MathSky 🧮

The thing is, Canadians know that Raffi has always been a real one.

If this is the trigger point for you where you suddenly clue in "wait, ICE is also rounding up people who didn't do anything wrong?" then I guess congrats for getting there eventually but you're kinda late to the party

“‘The persecution is the point,’ said Rep. Abi Boatman, a Wichita Democrat and the only transgender member of the Legislature, who received the [Kansas Dept of Revenue] notice on Wednesday.” To underscore that: a Kansas state legislator is among those whose driver’s license will be voided. (🎁 link:)

MY BEAUTIFUL SON JAMAL SHEAD

Abolish DHS

another year another state of the union in which the president clarifies nothing about determinants

Didn't watch the SOTU but I'm hearing that he didn't even MENTION a possible redesign of the undergraduate Linear Algebra curriculum!

Sid Meier really inspired a whole generation of AIs 🥰

This is a disgrace.

If you're interested in building interactive visuals or guided activities in your math classes, you should check out this free webinar about Doenet! I've loved using it in classes this year. Check out beta.doenet.org for examples, or I can show some of mine. (Especially relevant for #PreTeXtGang)

There are some days—very rare days that they are—when checking my email is actually the best part of the day and not the worst.

Faculty professional development day and instead of sitting in on the panel discussion on how to incorporate AI into our work, I'm wandering around the Art building looking at the galleries. Feels like a much better use of my time.