It's been a while, so here's a moment of recreational mathematics for you...
Here is one of my favorite specialty tiles from the deep triangleman archives.
That tile is a member of the family of spiraling pentagons and versatiles, and it does lots of fun stuff that they do, and also some other stuff that they do not.
A good deal of math's power lies in the problems to which it is applied.
What do we tell students about what math is good for when we select problems?
A journal article got me thinking about that this week. (Cover article in NCTM's MTLT, you can look it up, there's a paywall, you probably know someone who can find you a pdf)
I've had two contrasting experiences in cultural diversity and mathematics in the last 24 hours.
The first was yesterday afternoon, reading the cover story in the latest NCTM teacher journal "The Condo Problem".
That article critiques a textbooky problem that uses marriage as implicitly between a man and a woman, and describes the authors' journey in coming to understand the problem's problematic (as it were) nature.
Others around here may have read of his early math exploits. Critical thinking and all that.
I am happy to report that the occasion of his 16th finds him well of mind and body. Although with questionable taste in music (Africa by Toto is a current fave?!?!?!)