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A policy brief from the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing includes positive findings on computer games used to improve student math performance.

"As Markov chains have become commonplace tools, the story of their origin has largely faded from memory. The story is worth retelling. It features an unusual conjunction of mathematics and literature, as well as a bit of politics and even theology."

by dr. sarah-marie belcastro, "You might wonder why one would want to knit mathematical objects. One reason is that the finished objects make good teaching aids; a knitted object is flexible and can be physically manipulated, unlike beautiful and mathematically perfect computer graphics. And the process itself offers insights: In creating an object anew, not following someone else's pattern, there is deep understanding to be gained. To craft a physical instantiation of an abstraction, one must understand the abstraction's structure well enough to decide which properties to highlight. Such decisions are a crucial part of the design process, but for the specifics to make sense, we must first consider knitting geometrically."

Subtitled "A Place for Elegant Solutions." From the author's description: "This blog is a presentation of the interesting solutions I come across, and an exploration of the deeper mathematical ideas therein. Most often this means exploring the mathematical structure of a problem to lubricate the cogs of algorithm design. In seldom cases, this involves using programs to reason about mathematical theory."

Report from the National Academies. Summary: "The mathematical sciences are part of nearly all aspects of everyday life-the discipline has underpinned such beneficial modern capabilities as Internet search, medical imaging, computer animation, numerical weather predictions, and all types of digital communications. The Mathematical Sciences in 2025 examines the current state of the mathematical sciences and explores the changes needed for the discipline to be in a strong position and able to maximize its contribution to the nation in 2025. It finds the vitality of the discipline excellent and that it contributes in expanding ways to most areas of science and engineering, as well as to the nation as a whole, and recommends that training for future generations of mathematical scientists should be re-assessed in light of the increasingly cross-disciplinary nature of the mathematical sciences. In addition, because of the valuable interplay between ideas and people from all parts of the mathematical sciences, the report emphasizes that universities and the government need to continue to invest in the full spectrum of the mathematical sciences in order for the whole enterprise to continue to flourish long-term."

"Late last month, Curtis Cooper of the University of Central Missouri moved one small step closer to Euclid's infinity, when he announced that 257,885,161-1 is prime. This is now the largest known prime number, eclipsing the previous record-holder, which had been discovered at UCLA in 2008. The new number has 17,425,170 digits-just writing them down makes for a 22.45-megabyte text file. The UCLA number had knocked an earlier number of Cooper's, from 2006, out of the record books. "

"Nasa's Voyager spacecraft have enthralled everyone with their exploits on the edge of the Solar System, but their launch in 1977 was only possible because of some clever maths and the persistence of a PhD student who worked out how to slingshot probes into deep space".

Drawing on culture, creativity and computation in teacher education

"An average person can read out approximately 120 digits/min. Keeping this pace it would take more than 158,000 years to recite the 10 trillion digits of π discovered this year and roughly 3 weeks to read out the 4 million digits visualized here."

"Diagramly is a free online diagram drawing application. You can use it to create UML, entity relationship, org charts, BPMN and BPM, database schema and networks. Also possible are telecommunication network, workflow, flowcharts, maps overlays and GIS, electronic circuit and social network diagrams. It's like a mini version of Visio in your browser."

Summaries of presentations from a symposium at Florida International University in 2012

Mathematics teachers disagreeing with the math teaching methods espoused by the Khan Academy, including words from a Stanford PhD candidate: ""When you attempt to distribute mathematics through any of these media [such as YouTube videos, digital photos, MP3s, PDFs, blog posts, spoken words, and printed text] it changes the definition of mathematics."

Abstract "The relation between fidelity of implementation and student outcomes in a computer-based middle school mathematics curriculum was measured empirically. Participants included 485 students and 23 teachers from 11 public middle schools across seven states. Implementation fidelity was defined using two constructs: fidelity to structure and fidelity to process".

"This engaging book presents the essential mathematics needed to describe, simulate, and render a 3D world. Reflecting both academic and in-the-trenches practical experience, the authors teach you how to describe objects and their positions, orientations, and trajectories in 3D using mathematics. The text provides an introduction to mathematics for game designers, including the fundamentals of coordinate spaces, vectors, and matrices. It also covers orientation in three dimensions, calculus and dynamics, graphics, and parametric curves. "Visit the book's companion web site, gamemath.com, to download the example code and access other resources.

"algorithm based on the arithmetic-geometric mean that rapidly converges to pi. "

Mathematics in Popular Culture Essays on Appearances in Film, Fiction, Games, Television and Other Media Edited by Jessica K. Sklar and Elizabeth S. Sklar Foreword by Keith Devlin Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-4978-1 Ebook ISBN: 978-0-7864-8994-7 25 photos, appendices, notes, bibliographies, index 353pp. 2012

New York Times story of Neil Heffernan's creation of a computerized tutor designed to emulate actual teachers, eventually becoming ASSISTments

Describes Motion Math, an iPad game, shown in a study to improve 5th graders' facility with fractions