Many issues in the news may seem, on the surface, not to involve mathematics at all. While “number stories” complement, deepen, and regularly undermine “people stories,” mathematical naiveté puts everyday readers at a disadvantage. Probability and randomness enhance articles on crime, health risks, or other societal obsessions. Logic and self-reference can help to clarify the hazards of celebrity and spin-doctoring. Through the lenses of business finance, the multiplication principle, and...

Math is not just the language of numbers. It is also not just a subject for school children. What math, if any is important for adults? Where does America stand in the world in math and how can we improve? Is it the teaching? What kind of preparation do our youth need to succeed? What do we know about other kids in the world and how they perform — and why? The beauty of understanding math lies with how we frame questions and understand uncertainty. How do we treat math in our society and can...

We’ve all had great teachers who opened our minds — and maybe even changed our lives. But how can we make every teacher a star teacher? Elizabeth Green’s New York Times best-selling book Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone) presents teaching as a complex skill — one that requires infrastructure for support and training. She gives examples of the methods America’s best educators are using in the classroom, as well as how Japan’s education system has...

If the humanities continue to be an alternative to a serious encounter with numbers, the field will continue to shrink. So many of us are rightly concerned about declining enrolments in the humanities and wish to preserve the critical role of subjects such as history, philosophy, and literature to cultivate the mind and soul and ready students for so much more. The College Board President David Coleman, who holds three humanities degrees, sees hope only if the humanities adapt and by doing so...

In the spring of 2010, Steven Strogatz wrote a 15-part series on the elements of math for The New York Times. To both his and his editor’s surprise, each piece climbed the most emailed list and elicited hundreds of appreciative comments. Strogatz recounts his adventures in bringing math to the masses and shares the lessons he learned about what works — and what doesn’t — when it comes to making math accessible.

There is a big elephant standing in most math classrooms: the idea that only some students will do well in math. While parents, students, and many teachers believe it, the latest brain research tells us that this is wrong and that the messages we carry around in our heads about our own potential change the functioning of our brains. Until we transform the messages given in classrooms, homes, and through the media, the widespread math failure and severe inequalities that harm our country will...

Speakers: Michael Crow, Jose Ferreira, Elizabeth Green

More and more news involves numbers, so the practice of good journalism increasingly demands deft mathematical problem solving. What are best practices for mixing quantitative reasoning, big data, and visualization into reporting? Are there costs as well as benefits? What is the future of data journalism going to look like?