According to Nancy Kimberly of HASTAC, this set of video games won the 1st National STEM Video Game Challenge: "Numbaland!, produced by graduate students Derek Lomas of Carnegie Mellon University, Dixie Ching of New York University and Jeanine Sun of the University of California at San Diego, was the winner of the Collegiate and Impact Prizes and will receive $50,000 in total. The collection of four games allows children in kindergarten to grade 4 to construct a set of skills that helps develop their sense of number concepts"

A workshop that took place February 14, 2011 to February 16, 2011, facilitating discussion of "what is important about journal publishing to mathematicians," just released its final report.

Michael John Blake presents his musical interpretation in a video

A conference scheduled for July 20-21, 2011 in Bertinoro, Italy, aims at formulating strategies for a comprehensive digital mathematics literature library, addressing such considerations as algorithms, standards, technology, formats, markup languages, interoperability and publishing models.

A project at Imperial College (UK)aimed at creating a periodic table of fundamental geometric shapes, "building blocks" "Fano varieties"

"Street-Fighting Mathematics: The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving" by Sanjoy Mahajan, published in 2010. "Mahajan describes six tools: dimensional analysis, easy cases, lumping, picture proofs, successive approximation, and reasoning by analogy. Illustrating each tool with numerous examples, he carefully separates the tool-the general principle-from the particular application so that the reader can most easily grasp the tool itself to use on problems of particular interest." Available as a free download (Creative Commons License), .pdf): http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/full_pdfs/Street-Fighting_Mathematics.pdf

Cornell and Duke University presses jointly publish the online math journal community Project Euclid and recently announced that MathJax software would used for rendering equations in articles

Free open source textbook suitable for college juniors and seniors

A 10 part series by Professor Marcus du Satuoy, University of Oxford, "argues that mathematics is the driving force behind modern science. Ten fifteen minute podcasts that reveal the personalities behind the calculations from Newton to the present day. How do these masters of abstraction find a role in the real world?"

Description of a University of Queensland study involving 36 infants, half 15 months and half 18 months. Tests with counting videos suggests that the 18 month old children have a grasp of counting rules before they can count (for example, understanding that objects can be counted only once." Further research using brain imaging is suggested.

Well received book on using physics to demonstrate mathematical concepts by Mark Levi, professor of mathematics at Pennsylvania State University

video of a lecture at MIT given by professor and entrepreneur James Simons, who taught math at Stony Brook, founded an investment business, and now runs the Simons Foundation which "supports basic math and physics as well as autism research."

"the National Research Council (NRC) convened two public workshops to examine the impact and effectiveness of selected STEM undergraduate education innovations. This volume summarizes the workshops, which addressed such topics as the link between learning goals and evidence; promising practices at the individual faculty and institutional levels; classroom-based promising practices; and professional development for graduate students, new faculty, and veteran faculty. The workshops concluded with a broader examination of the barriers and opportunities associated with systemic change."

A programmer/developer reflects on lessons learned in mathematics. His blog is subtitled "algorithms for the heck of it.)

A collaboration among Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance & Education Next, the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, and Harvard Kennedy School . "To see how well the U.S. as a whole, each state, and certain urban districts do at producing high-achieving math students, the percentage of U.S. public and private school students in the high-school graduating Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished in mathematics in each of the 50 states and in 10 urban districts is compared to the percentages of similarly high achievers in 56 other countries." High-achieving students in the U.S. were outperformed by high achievers from other countries.

Experiments by University of Chicago psychologists with deaf people in Nicaragua who learned "homesigns" rather than formal sign language, could not count beyond three. In contrast, people learning sign language learn number words and number concept and understand large numbers. The findings ""suggest that language is an important player in number acquisition." The research is reported in PNAS: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/01/31/1015975108.abstract

A portal site for mathematical journals in Russian, some freely available issues and some embargoed for up to three years.

A geological statistician from Toronto uses the same logic he applies to geological problems to demonstrate that the apparent randomness of the lottery is not true.

"LyX combines the power and flexibility of TeX/LaTeX with the ease of use of a graphical interface."

From the abstract: "This research examined the effects of the objectifying gaze on math performance, interaction motivation, body surveillance, body shame, and body dissatisfaction. In an experiment, undergraduate participants (67 women and 83 men) received an objectifying gaze during an interaction with a trained confederate of the other sex. As hypothesized, the objectifying gaze caused decrements in women'smath performance but notmen's. Interestingly, the objectifying gaze also increased women's, but notmen's,motivation to engage in subsequent interactions with their partner. Finally, the objectifying gaze did not influence body surveillance, body shame, or body dissatisfaction forwomen or men. One explanation for themath performance and interaction motivation findings is stereotype threat. To the degree that the objectifying gaze arouses stereotype threat, math performance may decrease because it conveys that women's looks are valued over their other qualities. Furthermore, interaction motivation may increase because stereotype threat arouses belonging uncertainty or concerns about social connections. As a result, the objectifying gazemay trigger a vicious cycle in which women underperform but continue to interact with the people who led them to underperform in the first place. Implications for long-term consequences of the objectifying gaze and directions for future research are discussed." (Full text available online (.pdf) )for now) ) (Winner of the 2011 Georgia Babladelis Best Paper Award)