Ursula

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 13:48:26 GMT

My essay On Approaching Hard Problems, about a dear friend and attacks on the NSF, is reprinted in the latest edition of MAA Focus.

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Tue, 01 Apr 2025 19:11:54 GMT

My column The Teddy-Lambkin Theorem is live today. Check out my illustrations!

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Sat, 22 Feb 2025 21:16:40 GMT

A dear friend of mine lost her job last week. I wrote about how that happened, and our friendship.

(I used buttondown to make this one easier to share publicly--please do share the link if you are so inclined!)

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February topics: the largest small hexagon

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 18:19:35 GMT

octahedrite suggested a post about "cool geometry topics". I waited until I stumbled on a cool geometry fact via work. This one's elementary but adorable: what's the largest small polygon? For the purposes of this riddle, "small" means that the diameter (biggest distance from one corner to another) is a fixed small number, which we might as well say is 1 unit. Then you try to find the largest area given that constraint.

It turns out that when the polygon has an odd number of sides, the largest small polygon is always a regular polygon. So the largest small triangle is an equilateral triangle, the largest small pentagon has five equal sides and angles, and so forth. But the largest small hexagon is not an equilateral hexagon! You can find a picture of it at MathWorld, see an animation of its rotations at the delightfully old-fashioned website Hall of Hexagons, or read Ron Graham's original paper, which involves an argument via the excellently named (by Conway, unsurprisingly) thrackleations.

The largest small octagons, 10-gons, and 12-gons have also been identified, but for even-sided polygons with 14 or more sides, finding the best one is still an open problem.

(You can suggest more topics here.)

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romances, voting, and math

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 12:59:05 GMT

An hour of Zooming with me (and an extra hour for subsequent research dives) is part of the Romancing the Vote auction!

Proceeds go to US voting rights organizations (there are options for people who want to bid but aren't based in the US). Take some time to browse! There's lots of cool stuff, including gorgeous quilts and books from Naomi Kritzer and Kate Elliott.

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elliptic curves, game theory edition

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 16:58:52 GMT

My math column Elliptic curves come to date night is now live (and not a joke, except inasmuch as game theory example decisions are always counterintuitive!)

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dragons and aspirations

Sat, 19 Aug 2023 14:46:08 GMT

I have a new newsletter post up at buttondown. If you want the very quick version, there are links to my essay The Gamemaster’s Guide to Short Story Plot and the book containing my career/coming-out essay Branch Cuts, along with a cat picture.

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Tue, 04 Jul 2023 00:39:04 GMT

I wrote a column about number theory, particle physics, and the geometry of doughnuts!

(This one does assume some calculus, but there's a compensatory Jorts cartoon.)

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Tue, 14 Mar 2023 12:55:22 GMT

I'm a source for an article on Pi Day and the movie Pi that's in Wired today.

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2021 writing

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 19:09:18 GMT

Here's a collection of the fiction, poetry, and popular math writing that I published in 2021.

fiction

The Association of Twelve Thousand Flowers, at Cossmass Infinities.

poetry

"Ansibles" (Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine)
"Unmarked Country Roads" and "Marseille" (Cirque Journal)
"Physics 6" (Climbing Lightly Through Forests)

I participated in an online poetry reading and was interviewed in the Asimov's blog:

Asimov's interview about poetry and "Ansibles"
Video of me reading "Physics 6" and "The ten categories" for the 2021 Bridges poetry reading.
Video of sbrackett and me reading the poem for the 2021 Bridges poetry reading.

math

My big math-writing accomplishment was posting the preprint version of an essay on gender, sexuality, and career, Branch cuts: writing, editing, and ramified complexities.

I also posted three AMS Feature Columns:

reviewing

Risk Analysis and Romance is a book review as well as a math essay. You can find more book reviews under the reviewing tag!

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rithmomachia

Mon, 12 Jul 2021 17:55:17 GMT

I wrote about the medieval educational game of rithmomachia for the July AMS Feature Column.

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publishing things

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 21:20:36 GMT

I have two really different publications out today.

Climbing Lightly Through Forests, an anthology in honor of Ursula K. Le Guin, includes a poem called "Physics 6" that I wrote as an undergrad and revised in grad school. You can find the book via the Aqueduct Press website or my bookshop.org affiliate link.
In the February AMS Feature Column, Risk and Romance, I write about research projects for a Courtney Milan heroine.

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2020 writing

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 23:49:47 GMT

Here's the poetry and popular math writing I published in 2020.

poetry

The ten categories of being believed by Aristotle, Liminality
Gifts for a dry country, Rough Cut Press
Weighted graph at Liminality, with sbrackett!
"Difference Equations" and "K-Theory", in the 2020 Bridges Poetry Anthology or part of my reading here.

math

Quantifying Injustice (AMS Feature Column)
From Strings to Mirrors (AMS Feature Column)

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intersections & intersectionality

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 21:23:25 GMT

Dandrielle Lewis interviews me about identity and intersectionality in the January 2021 issue of the Mathematical Association of America's Focus magazine.

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new AMS column

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 17:25:08 GMT

My essay Quantifying Injustice, on research into problems with policing algorithms, has now been posted. (Check out the images I found for illustrations!)

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TQFT for vampires

Wed, 02 Oct 2019 01:24:26 GMT

My first AMS Feature Column, Topological Quantum Field Theory for Vampires is now live, with art from cassyblue. Thank you to everyone who helped me workshop this!

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behold the mathematical field...

Fri, 10 May 2019 23:58:13 GMT

yhlee asked for a math-check of this Tumblr post. Here are some thoughts!

I've seen a few variants on this string of jokes; in particular, I'm pretty sure that the claim that ( behold the field... )

I need to catch a plane, so I'm not going to talk about why people care about fields or Banach spaces right this second, but you should ask me those questions in comments!

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podcast

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 01:04:27 GMT

My interview for the "My Favorite Theorem" podcast went live today! Here's Evelyn Lamb's blog post about the episode, mirror symmetry, and ramen, and here is the episode and a transcript.

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a couple of math & gaming articles

Tue, 05 Feb 2019 03:18:44 GMT

Recently, I came across a couple of fun articles about math and computer games in MAA (Mathematical Association of America) publications.

( Here's a disclaimer on reading math articles. )

Aaron M. Broussard, Martin E. Malandro, and Abagayle Serreyn, Optimizing the Video Game Multi-Jump (American Mathematical Monthly).

This article is about platformer video games where a character can jump, then magically start another jump in mid-air. The question is how to time the jumps so the character lands at a specific point (on a floating platform, for example). There are explicit solutions if the path of each jump is part of a parabola, as well as a discussion for more general, perhaps-fantastic jump shapes. I enjoyed the comments in this article about the way AI-controlled characters in specific games fail to make optimal decisions.

Tom Edgar and Jessica Sklar, A Confused Electrician Uses Smith Normal Form (Mathematics Magazine).

This article is about the type of puzzle where flipping a switch or pressing a button can turn multiple lights on or off, or rotate them through different colors. The goal is to find the right combination of button-presses that will turn all the lights on or off simultaneously. The analysis starts with graph theory, converts it to a problem involving matrices of integers, invokes the SageMath computer algebra system and a little bit of number theory, and ends with Smith normal form. Smith normal form is a beautiful way to factor matrices, but if you never restrict yourself to integer matrices, you probably haven't heard of it. It was the solution to a problem I ran into when I was writing my dissertation, and I've had a soft spot for it ever since.

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graphing the logarithm

Tue, 06 Mar 2018 15:38:59 GMT

In hexarchate_rpg, my character is currently teaching an eldritch alien the human notation for graphing logarithms, because decibels are on a logarithmic scale and she wants to talk to it about appropriate singing volume. (In retrospect, starting with exponential notation might've been faster, but I'm committed now.) I find "Kids, if you don't pay attention in algebra class, you won't be able to shush the alien" a hilarious argument, though in meta-gaming terms this level of tangent suggests that I really need to get my character back into a situation where she's communicating with other PCs.

Anyway, I looked up the history of the logarithm graph, which is kind of neat. As far as I can tell, the first person to graph the logarithm function was Leibniz (historically, you first see tables of values and second the relation to the area under a hyperbola). He wrote an article relating the graph of the logarithm to the graph of a catenary, the shape of a hanging chain. There's a simplified version of his figure here, and a modern historical discussion in this book.

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business case for higher ed: public version

Wed, 11 May 2016 18:07:08 GMT

My university's student body president made national news this morning, which means it's time to make that essay I've been writing about tenure public:

https://medium.com/@superyarn/the-business-case-for-tenure-ecf9b149c3e3#.w8rafie7d

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in which I attempt to write poetry about math

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 04:37:33 GMT

Does this make sense if you don't know who Sophie Germain is? Is it interesting if you do? What should I change?

***

Boundary Conditions
Royal Academy of Science, Paris, 1823

This is her moment of triumph:
a seat at the center, a node.
Mademoiselle Germain sits silent,
head upright, chaperoned.
Academy members rise
or dip; the speaker drones.

Steel plate hums to the bow
like silk stretched tight.
Who grasps the edge controls--
she claims-- the waves inside.
She makes her hands unfold.
Her lips taste dry.

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Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:50:44 GMT

I've been teaching a half-semester differential equations class, which means that as of today I'm finished teaching for the year (except for grading).

Our final homework assignment was, "Summarize this course in a creative way." One of the submissions was this surprisingly sophisticated music video:

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