The DreamBox Learning Blog

As I’ve said here before, I’m fascinated by how artists put math to work. Part of this interest stems from my own experience as the daughter of an engineer who majored in art; and part from hearing my son say something to the effect of “why do I need to take math – I’m going to be an artist/animator/cartoonist/you get the idea.”

Lights, cameras, math geeks! The typical A-lister is a parfait of perfection: golden hair, blinding white Veneers, and a multitude of creative talents. But there's a secret math geek lurking beneath the polished surface of each of these celebrities.

Our youngest daughter recently came home facing the decision of whether for the next school year she should go into ‘honors’ math class or the regular math class. We haven’t really faced this before, as the right decision for each of our two older children was straightforward, although different for each. I have seen the angst it has has caused in other families. The stress was particularly acute in those cases where placement was decided by a single test result.

Every day now driving home and listening to the news, I try, like everyone else I imagine, to wrap my head around the kinds of numbers they’re throwing around. The scale of the numbers is incomprehensible. How meaningful is the difference between a billion and a trillion...

I recently came across two articles that really caught my eye.The first was in the Wall Street Journal and was a ranking of the best jobs in the US. Mathematician was ranked #1, with Actuary and Statistician holding #2 and #3 respectively.

Just as parents need to make sure their children eat a mix of healthy foods - with reasonable limits on junk food and sweets - we need to have the same mindset about what our children watch. That’s the message of a recent New York Times article: Limiting, and Watching, What Children Watch, by Lisa Guernsey, and I couldn’t agree more!

As I read the economic headlines today and the news about AIG’s bailout, I can’t help think about how much math is being done right now all over Washington, Wall Street, and the world. Serious folks are attempting to calculate the impact of this financial melee across instruments, sectors, and countries. Some of the math is easy, more is fuzzy, and even more is mind-numbing in its complexity.