Devlin's Angle by Keith Devlin

Mathematician Keith Devlin is the Executive Director of the Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute (H-STAR) at Stanford University and The Math Guy on NPR's Weekend Edition.

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Devlin's Angle is a monthly column sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America.

This column does not reflect an official position of the Mathematical Association of America.

Past Columns

"It Only Takes About 42 Minutes To Learn Algebra With Video Games"
July 2013
Will Cantor's Paradise Ever Be of Practical Use?
June 2013
The Mother of all NCTM Addresses
May 2013
Only in Silicon Valley
April 2013
Can we make constructive use of machine-graded, multiple-choice questions in university mathematics education?
March 2013
The The Problem with Instructional Videos
February 2013
R.I.P. Mathematics? Maybe.
January 2013
The Darwinization of Higher Education
December 2012
MOOC Lessons
November 2012
The Fibonacci dedication in Pisa
October 2012
What is mathematical thinking?
September 2012
The future of textbook publishing is us
August 2012
“Can’t we all get along?”
July 2012
Telling stories with numbers
June 2012
Math MOOC – Coming this fall. Let’s Teach the World.
May 2012
When math and art meet
April 2012
The difference between teaching and instruction
March 2012
If You Don’t Have a Web Presence, Are You Doing Your Job?
February 2012
Patterns? What patterns?
January 2012
Christmas Trees from the Land of Santa Claus
December 2011
How multiplication is really defined in Peano arithmetic
November 2011
Mathematics: A Recyclable Tool for the Modern Era
October 2011
The First Arithmetic Textbook in the Western World
September 2011
The First Personal Computing Revolution
August 2011
Students should learn everyday math the way they learn to play a musical instrument
July 2011
Wanted: a Mathematical iPod
June 2011
The Keyring Problem: NCTM fumbles the ball
May 2011
Finger Counting
April 2011
Learning Math with a Video Game
March 2011
Bad Math, Bad Thinking: the BMI and DNA Identification Revisited
February 2011
What Exactly is Multiplication?
January 2011
The Innumeracy Behind Airline Security
December 2010
The Other Thing Fourier Did
November 2010
Twist or Bust
October 2010
A Fibonacci Photo Album
September 2010
2010: A Space Odyssey
August 2010
Wanted: Innovative Mathematical Thinking
July 2010
In Math You Have to Remember, In Other Subjects You Can Think About It
June 2010
The Problem with Word Problems
May 2010
Probability Can Bite
April 2010
The Hidden Math Behind Alice in Wonderland
March 2010
Is Math a Socialist Plot?
February 2010
Repeated addition - one more spin
January 2010
Strictly for the Birds
December 2009
Cross Talk
November 2009
Soft Mathematics
October 2009
Reaching Out - With Style
September 2009
In Praise of Good Editors
August 2009
Trisecting Devlin's Angle
July 2009
What's the Real Story?
June 2009
Do You Believe in Fairies, Unicorns, or the BMI?
May 2009
Stanislaw Ulam - a Great American
April 2009
What is Experimental Mathematics?
March 2009
When the Evidence Deceives Us
February 2009
Should Children Learn Math by Starting with Counting?
January 2009
How Do We Learn Math?
December 2008
Polling, Polling, Polling
November 2008
The Big Mortgage Surprise
October 2008
Multiplication and Those Pesky British Spellings
September 2008
It's Still Not Repeated Addition
July-August 2008
It Ain't No Repeated Addition
June 2008
Lockhart's Lament - The Sequel
May 2008
The Napkin Ring Problem
April 2008
Lockhart's Lament
March 2008
Mathematics for the President and Congress
February 2008
American Mathematics in a Flat World
January 2008
Predicting Mathematical Ability
December 2007
The Smallest Computer in the World
November 2007
Kinds of Math
October 2007
What is Conceptual Understanding?
September 2007
The Professor, the Prosecutor, and the Blonde With the Ponytail
July-August 2007
The Trouble With Math
June 2007
The Myth That Will Not Go Away
May 2007
Finding Musical Beauty in Euler's Identity
April 2007
E8 Mapped
March 2007
How to stabilize a wobbly table
February 2007
DNA math and the end of innocence
January 2007
The biggest science breakthrough of the year
December 2006
Will the real continuous function please stand up?
November 2006
Damned Lies
October 2006
Statisticians not wanted
September 2006
Ten Years On
July-August 2006
Letter to a calculus student
June 2006
The Mathematics of Aircraft Boarding
May 2006
How a wave led to a prize
April 2006
How do we learn math?
March 2006
Cracking the Code
February 2006
Infinity and Intuition
January 2006
Monty Hall revisited
December 2005
Common confusions II
November 2005
Common confusions
October 2005
Naming theorems
September 2005
When numbers matter
July/August 2005
Staying the course
June 2005
Street Mathematics
May 2005
What does "DOING MATH" mean?
April 2005
Mathematics: a natural pursuit
March 2005
NUMB3RS gets the math right
February 2005
Last doubts removed about the proof of the Four Color Theorem
January 2005
The Amazing Ahmed
December 2004
Election Math
November 2004
When Google becomes ePlay
October 2004
A game of numbers
September 2004
The Two Envelopes Paradox
July-August 2004
Good stories, pity they're not true
June 2004
The best popular science essay ever
May 2004
Abel Prize Awarded: The Mathematicians' Nobel
April 2004
A Year of Anniversaries
March 2004
The Archimedes Cattle Problem
February 2004
The Mathematics of Human Thought
January 2004