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“Math equity” doesn’t mean 1 + 1 = 2. The term refers to the growing insistence among educators that teaching math in the classroom comes with some inherently biased methodology that must be addressed. Proponents of “math equity” also stress the importance of social justice issues such as race, diversity and gender in math education — a trend that’s catching on. More professors and educators are tweeting under the hashtag #MathEquity to share strategies on the topic, and webinars and other pedagogical sessions on it abound.

The problem with “rights based” arguments, quite honestly, is they go nowhere, because of what government is. Government, at its root, is an exchange of some amount of liberty for some amount of security. It’s a grand bargain. Some governments take more of your liberty, and grant you more security in exchange. Some take more and grant you less security. Some leave you more liberty and grant you less security. Some leave you with a lot of both. And every argument about every government policy can, at its root, be boiled down to an exchange of some amount of liberty...

balance between order and disorder, or entropy, he said. "We can look at a balance—or a competition—between dissonance and entropy of sound—and see that phase transitions can also occur from disordered sound to the ordered structures of music," he said. Berezovsky ... he's uncovering the "emergent structures of musical harmony" inherent in the art, just as order comes from disorder in the physical world. He believes that could mean a whole new way of looking at music of the past, present and future. Berezovsky said his theory is more than just an illustration of how we think about music. Instead,...

Bill Gates is among the richest, most successful people on the planet. He enjoyed a lot of victories until he ventured into a dangerous part of town called Education. He squandered a few billion dollars by becoming entangled with a shady character named Common Core. Since 2010, Gates endured a long, slow defeat, as more people turned against Common Core, and he himself realized that it was not what he had dreamed of. So how did Bill Gates lose his golden touch? Gates, computer man and businessman, trusted data neatly arrayed on monitors. Digital tools could give predictability, consistency, and...

Belphegor's prime number Belphegor's prime number is a palindromic prime number with a 666 hiding between 13 zeros and a 1 on either side. The ominous number can be abbreviated as 1 0(13) 666 0(13) 1, where the (13) denotes the number of zeros between the 1 and 666. Although he didn't "discover" the number, scientist and author Cliff Pickover made the sinister-feeling number famous when he named it after Belphegor (or Beelphegor), one of the seven demon princes of hell. The number apparently even has its own devilish symbol, which looks like an upside-down symbol for pi. According to...

This week, WBC fellow Jonathan Bartlett, along with co-author Asatur Zh. Khurshudyan, published a paper showing that elementary calculus contains a longstanding flaw that has been present for over a century. The paper was published in the peer-reviewed journal Dynamics of Continuous, Discrete & Impulsive Systems, Series A: Mathematical Analysis: Mathematical Analysis (DCDIS-A, for short). The journal has been published for a quarter of a century and many major universities across the United States subscribe to it. The flaw they discovered is one of notation. Now, you may be thinking, how can notation be wrong? Well, notation can be wrong...

Running for president in the age of celebrity is one of the fastest and surest ways to become a bona fide celebrity. Even failing to win his or her party’s nomination is still a win-win since the title “former presidential candidate” beefs up the résumé and increases name recognition, thus paying dividends with TV gigs, speaking engagements and book deals. There is little downside because running for commander-in-chief can pave the way for another elective office or an easier re-election to one’s current office. But best of all, history proves that an initial run for president increases the prospects of...

Yes, today is Pi Day! What is your favorite Pi math question?

Dozens of manuscripts belonging to Albert Einstein, many of them unseen in public before, have been unveiled by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. More than 110 new documents are now on display at the university, marking the 140th anniversary of Einstein's birth. It was donated by the Crown-Goodman Family Foundation and purchased from a private collector in North Carolina. The manuscripts contain an appendix to Einstein's article on Unified Theory ... The collection includes scientific work by the Nobel Prize winner that has never been published or researched.

Pasadena City College students are the top users in the entire country of a free online textbook resource called OpenStax. At PCC, over 46,000 students are using a free OpenStax textbook instead of the print editions, leading to an estimated savings of $4.2 million. OpenStax, a nonprofit based at Rice University in Texas, said PCC topped the list of schools nationwide where students take advantage of the free textbook technology for the 2017-2018 academic year. OpenStax textbooks are in use at 48 percent of colleges and universities in the U.S....

Three weeks into tax season, Americans' tax refunds are shrinking. The average refund issued through Feb. 15 was 16 percent smaller than this time last year, according to data released by the Internal Revenue Service. The average refund so far this year is $2,640, down from $3,169 in 2018. The number of taxpayers getting refunds is also sharply lower compared with last year -- down more than 26 percent, though the number of tax returns processed was down by only 6.6 percent. For now, experts caution against reading too much into the IRS figures, which can swing dramatically week to...

sadora Bielsky's tax bill this year brought her to tears. Last year, her family of four's refund topped $3,600. This year, the Colorado family owed in the thousands. "I plugged it all in and at first I thought oh my goodness we're getting $8,000 back and then I realized it was the wrong color … so I went back in and checked everything and then I started to cry," Bielsky said. Many Americans are learning their tax refund is not as much as they expected, or they are receiving a big tax bill. The average refund compared to last year...

The 10,958 Problem, based on work by Brazilian mathematician Inder J. Taneja. The 10,958 Problem | Numberphile | Featuring Matt Parker | YouTube | Published on Apr 18, 2017 | Video by Brady Haran

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez floated her idea (quasi-embraced by Sen. Kamala Harris) to raise the top marginal income tax rate to 70 percent on the richest Americans in order to pay for her "Green New Deal," I wrote that governmental confiscation of 70 cents on any dollar earned in a free society is unfair and immoral.  But would such a scheme at least make significant headway toward boosting federal revenues, commensurate with the orgy of new spending the Democratic Left is advocating?  Budget analyst Brian Riedl crunches the numbers for the Daily Beast and details the predictable answer to that...

Before we delve into her new "argument," I'd like to make a point about why the conservative commentariat sometimes seems fixated on Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  First, she entered the national spotlight as a media fascination and darling -- a young woman of color who shook up the Democratic Party from the left by defeating an establishment fixture.  She wasn't randomly plucked from relative obscurity by right-wing writers or pundits for sport; she was elevated by a mainstream media that loves covering, and sympathizes with, rising liberal stars.  And please recall the DNC Chairman referring to her as "the future of...

Hi. Time for a non-political break from the usual anti-lib articles which we all love here. I have a math question for my genius Freepers because I know conservatives are smarter than idiot liberals so the question is " how many stupid liberals does it take to screw a light bulb? ANSWER: None, they think the light bulb will lead to climate change (drum beat) OK, that's not it (j/k) but here it is: I have a relative (self-made/taught/ no HS diploma but makes more than I do) who sells on an online platform like Ebay. She will sell fabrics...

You may not have heard of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, but, among anime fans at least, it’s a pretty big deal. Originally a series of light novels, it follows the adventures of typical high schooler Kyon and the time-travel alien ESP club he is forced to help create by his beautiful if eccentric friend, the titular Haruhi. Since its original run in 2003, it has spawned 10 additional volumes, a film adaptation, several video games, and even its own religion, Haruhiism. It was first adapted into an anime back in 2006. The show only lasted three months but there...

Puzzles9 shared a brain teaser with three pentagons, each with a set of five numbers. The middle pentagon is missing a number. To fill in the missing number, you must figure out the relationship between the numbers in the pentagons and continue the sequence.

“What he showed in the presentation is very unlikely to be anything like a proof of the Riemann hypothesis as we know it,” says Jørgen Veisdal, an economist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim who has previously studied the Riemann hypothesis. “It is simply too vague and unspecific.” Veisdal added that he would need to examine the written proof more closely to make a definitive judgement. The Riemann hypothesis, one of the last great unsolved problems in math, was first proposed in 1859 by German mathematician Bernhard Riemann. It is a supposition about prime numbers, such...

CHARLOTTE, NC (WBTV) - Some North Carolina elementary school teachers were initially told they would lose their jobs if they didn't pass a Math test they call difficult and unfair. Teachers say they recently got a call from their school district informing them they have another year to pass the test. Hundreds of teachers have failed the test repeatedly. Teachers argue what's on the test has nothing to do with what they teach in a classroom for students in Kindergarten to 5th grade. "Never in a million years would we even come close to teaching some of the topics on...