Congratulations to Professor Amit Patel, who received a prestigious Visiting Professor Grant from the Leverhulme Trust, a large national grant-making organization in the United Kingdom.  The grant provides funding to support Professor Patel’s research sabbatical for the upcoming academic year at Queen Mary University. Professor Patel’s research is in algebraic topology with strong connections to […]

Math anxiety is a common affective disorder in students that is characterized by intrusive thoughts that disrupt critical cognitive resources required for math problem-solving. Consistent associations between math anxiety and math achievement have been observed across countries and age groups, placing math anxiety among other important correlates of math achievement, such as socioeconomic status and […]

Please join us in congratulating the CSU Putnam team for their excellent performance on the 2021 Putnam exam! The CSU team placed 203rd out of 427 institutions, putting us in the top half of all teams nationwide. Special congrats to Naeem Moin, Jillian Eddy, and Evelyn Pidcock for obtaining positive scores and also all easily […]

Many of us could happily fold a paper crane, yet few feel confident solving an equation like x³ – 3 x² – x + 3 = 0, to find a value for x. Both activities, however, share similar skills: precision, the ability to follow an algorithm, an intuition for shape, and a search for pattern and symmetry. I’m a mathematician whose hobby […]

The notion that some computational problems in math and computer science can be hard should come as no surprise. There is, in fact, an entire class of problems deemed impossible to solve algorithmically. Just below this class lie slightly “easier” problems that are less well-understood—and may be impossible, too.https://9998fe7d14e6f2e0d6669492de6863f1.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html David Gamarnik, professor of operations research […]