Joe Champion @ChampMath

As the first reanalysis data become available, I think I can say with a fairly high degree of confidence that the March 2026 heatwave will go down as the most anomalously extreme heat event ever observed at any time of year in the southwestern U.S.

@grok Overall on X, what percentage of comments about the recent U.S. bombing of Iran are positive and/or supportive of the military action?

@grok @seapluz1 @JDVance @grok what results do you get if you increase the sample size to 1000?

@mathgeek76 It comes down to the function part. Polynomial functions and linear functions can be expressed in y= form, but not the general forms. That said, I agree, no reason to make ax+by=c something that *every teenager* needs to study.

Math teacher ed friends - check out my colleagues talk on a cool set of video cases for teaching functions! This Thursday, Oct 24 @ 3pm EDT. sigmaa.maa.org/ibl/events.html

The simplest way to visualize the set of numbers. Utterly useful diagram!❤️ [bit.ly/3hETqNE]

A Brief History of Students Today Aren’t Prepared for College 🧵

Strong evidence showing that getting a PhD is extremely bad for your mental health. A new paper uses Swedish medical records and matches them to the full population of PhD students for which the authors could get gender and birth year data from 2006 to 2017. After some exclusion criteria, they end up with a sample size of 20,085 individuals. The paper compares PhD students to those who have masters degrees and don't start a PhD program. Before starting a PhD program, people who stop at a masters and those who go on to seek a PhD have similar rates of psychiatric medication use and hospitalization. A few years into a PhD program, however, 40% more individuals are on psychiatric medications, before the number falls off as people leave or finish their studies. You see the same pattern with psychiatric hospitalizations. PhD students are up to 150-175% more likely to be hospitalized after starting a program! These are incredible numbers, too massive to be the result of chance or a flaw in the methodology. This is comparing the same people over time. If you're considering a PhD program, and the terrible job prospects and waste of time aren't enough, here's yet another reason to stay away.

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

@techknowmath that looks pretty darn simplified to me! A polynomial factored into monomials is 'fully simplified', right?

@CmonMattTHINK B is correct (but perhaps TMI). A is only correct if 'inverse' is synonymous with 'inverse function' (maybe true in high school, but not college?). It's a like the Vertical Line Test (only works for deciding whether y is a function of x, which breaks down)

Such a wonderfully written, compassionate story. Well worth an 11 minute read. time.com/7002003/donald…

Google DeepMind have produced a program that in a certain sense has achieved a silver-medal peformance at this year's International Mathematical Olympiad. 🧵 deepmind.google/discover/blog/…

#iteachmath - I love his honesty here! It started in 3rd grade as he's learning about multiplication and square roots. Sounds like "multiply makes bigger" is the main conceptual issue.

Saw a neat new experiment about shower water consumption. They published the data, so here's a cool original chart (in case you ever need to argue about shower times with friends and family) @ppereiradoel @SurreySustain @ianwalker osf.io/preprints/osf/…

@cluzniak Open intervals make more sense here (the function is neither increasing nor decreasing at places in which the slope (derivative) is undefined)

These boxes are not moving

@RobertTalbert If you're using ggplot, a couple suggestions: (1) adding aes(size = count) to the points would make points with larger counts bigger, (2) adding coord_cartesian(clip = 'off') + theme(plot.margin = margin(1, 1, 1, 1, "cm")) would stop the clipping of pts at the edges.

Such a great example of how math gets adapted to contexts! With attention to nuance, it's reasonable to think of numbers as simply 'small' or 'large', with intuitive rules about combining them.

Anthony Bonato @Anthony_Bonato

2 years ago

The dark, arcane world of physics

67 353 4K 342K 453

Thoughts on books. By @ErrantScience, errantscience.com, cc-by-nc