I’ve been watching Apple Cider Vinegar on Netflix, and thinking about our new Secretary of Health and Human Services and measles outbreaks. It is all very depressing. If you’re not reading Audrey Watters on AI right now, you probably ought to be.

A common thread in all of this is grift. 

To succeed at these grifts, you have to claim falsehoods as truths and offer your own nonsense as the solution to the problem. There is no room for nuance.

But the truth is nuanced, and so is beauty. The world is messy and the work I like best, and that I find most interesting, offers us new ways to understand or express this messiness.

People are often surprised to learn that I think math is nuanced. Nuance is counter to the reputation of mathematics in our culture, which is all about clear and unambiguous truths, and about right and wrong.

Which One Doesn’t Belong? Well, it depends on what criteria we’re using. How Many? Well, it depends on what you’re counting.

My latest deep dive into nuanced mathematics is How Did You Count? Like its predecessors, How Did You Count? is a picture book and a teacher’s guide, all focused on sorting out and celebrating the many, many ways to answer a nuanced question. If you multiplied three times four to know there are twelve tangerines, did you even count at all? (I say “Yes!” without hesitation, as counting is any work that you do to know how many of something there are.)

The book comes out March 31. See the very end of this newsletter for preorder information.

In the meantime, a beautiful math postcard won’t solve all your problems—this is no grift, after all—but it will probably bring a little bit of joy to your mailbox. It’s free and you can sign up for your postcard here.

Follow along on Instagram throughout the month of March for weekly book and math toy giveaways, and to share your counting strategies and develop new ones!

Alexa on rectangles

There are a couple minutes of very silly fun to be had on this old clip of Anthony Mackie on Jimmy Fallon’s show as they try to get a smart speaker to say the word “rectangle”.

If I were still teaching a geometry course for future teachers, we would spend some time appreciating the joy here, and then going deep on analysis of what this short piece means about our societal relationship with mathematics.

Squares and rectangles

That lovely clip reminded me of a bit of silliness from quite a while back, which I shared on Twitter when it happened:

11-year-old the other day: "Is this blanket a square or a rectangle?"

Me: "Well it's certainly a rectangle."

11yo: [eyes roll to very back of head; breathes deep sigh] Do you think it's square or non-square?

…5 minutes later…

11yo: "Well, actually it's not a rectangle because the angles aren't quite 90°”

That 11 year old turns 18 this week. Happy birthday!

Hat tiles

Before 2023, the question, “Is there a single tile that only tiles the plane non-periodically?” had no known answer.

We now know the answer is “Yes!” and you can hold an example in your hands. After a long, slow development process, the Talking Math with Your Kids shop is selling beautiful wooden hat tiles. Click through to have a look and to learn more.

Infinite Monkey Theorem

In a very silly news event recently, Australian mathematicians refuted the Infinite Monkey Theorem which states that given infinite time, monkeys banging on keyboards will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.

The basis of the refutation was that the time required would be greater than the life of the universe. 

There are lots of things that are true of infinite processes but not true of finite ones, so I cannot actually endorse this group’s work. 

They did run some interesting calculations by imagining the world’s population of chimpanzees and what they could produce in a finite amount of time. Importantly though, chimpanzees are not monkeys.

A final quote that might just as well be about our current age of AI slop as about random primate typing

Planetary Orbits

Here is a short tale of a child insisting on a very particular and important kind of accuracy in his books about planets.

How Did You Count? is available for preorders (recommended for grades 3 and up)
picture book: Amazon—Bookshop.org—Stenhouse/Routledge 
picture book with teacher guide: Amazon—Bookshop.org—Stenhouse/Routledge

The Talking Math with Your Kids newsletter is lovingly compiled and written by Christopher Danielson. Comments, questions, suggestions, and requests always welcome.