Clayton Ladue Blog

The case for 'math-ish' thinking

May 24, 2024 | Clayton Ladue Blog

That narrow, rigid version of mathematics where there's only one right approach is what most students experience, and it's a big part of why people have such math trauma. It keeps them from realizing the full range and power of mathematics. When you only have students blindly memorizing math facts, they're not developing number sense.

Professors say high school math doesn’t prepare most students for their college majors2

Nov 30, 2023 | Clayton Ladue Blog

Professors say they really want their students to be able to analyze data, create charts and spreadsheets and reason mathematically – skills that high school math courses often skip or rush through. “Teachers are so focused on covering all the topics that they don’t have time to do the practices when the practices are what really matters,”

Bill Gates says America has a math problem. Here are his three suggestions to help kids learn to love the subject like he does.

Oct 6, 2023 | Clayton Ladue Blog

Gates says math education hasn't kept up with how the world has evolved. In his post, Gates said math skills were a "powerful indicator" of future success...

Scientists Discover 'Pure Math' Is Written Into Evolutionary Genetics

Sep 10, 2023 | Clayton Ladue Blog

...nature is a wonderful realm in which to observe beauty born out of mathematical relationships. The natural world provides seemingly endless patterns underpinned by numbers – if we can recognize them.

Unexpected link between pure mathematics and genetics discovered1

Aug 14, 2023 | Clayton Ladue Blog

Number theory finds unexpected applications in science and engineering, from leaf angles that (almost) universally follow the Fibonacci sequence, to modern encryption techniques based on factoring prime numbers.

Bringing the lofty ideas of pure math down to earth

May 11, 2023 | Clayton Ladue Blog

Many popular books on mathematics try to be approachable by talking about stock markets or poker odds.Others wax poetic about prime numbers and the mystery of infinity. Cheng’s books lift readers to the rarefied heights of mathematical abstraction by teaching them category theory, which she believes is the most foundational kind of math.

The Basic Algebra Behind Secret Codes and Space Communication

Jan 24, 2023 | Clayton Ladue Blog

Space exploration requires tremendous precision. Mathematicians have invented ingenious ways to transmit and store information. One surprisingly effective method uses Reed-Solomon codes, which are built on the same basic algebra that students learn in school.

From Systems in Motion, Infinite Patterns Appear

Dec 8, 2022 | Clayton Ladue Blog

Szemerédi proved that any set comprising a positive fraction of the integers must contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. The result was a landmark in the subfield of mathematics called additive combinatorics.