The 'Meme for Mathematicians' page has around 250k followers and has been entertaining math enthusiasts since 2020. And it's not just a Facebook page; they're on Instagram, too. Their X (Twitter) page, however, goes in a bit of a different direction. Titled RoughHistory, it's a place for interesting historical pictures, coupled with the occasional funny memes and videos.
We might think that not many people go on to study mathematics, but in 2020, about 1.9 million students got their bachelor's degrees in mathematics. The 2018 Cambridge International Global Education Census actually found that mathematics was the most popular subject among students.
To learn more about the wonderful world of mathematics, we reached out to Ben Orlin. He's the author of four books about mathematics: Math with Bad Drawings, Change is the Only Constant, Math Games with Bad Drawings, and Math for English Majors which came out this year. He presents the many practical and wonderful ways in which math shapes our world. And he does that through the medium of stick figure cartoons.
Ben is a Yale graduate in mathematics and grew up in a very mathematical world. His dad is a math professor at MIT, his sister is a math teacher as well, and his wife is a research mathematician. But Ben decided to become a teacher of mathematics in quite an unconventional, less academic way.
"Math is gorgeous and bizarre," Ben tells us when we ask him why math is important for everyone to know. "It gives us fractal coastlines, logical paradoxes, infinities nested like matryoshka dolls, perfect wheels that aren't circles, and curves that somehow have a sharp corner at every single point."
"At its best, math will blow your mind into little pieces, and then stitch those pieces back together into a whole new mind that better appreciates the weirdness of our universe."
As a teacher, Ben knows a thing or two about how hard the subject can be for some students. Sometimes, it's not just about maths being hard; some students can find it outright boring. He says the first thing teachers should do is establish a connection. "You've got to know your students," he says. "There's no teaching without relationships."
However, just because math is hard, that shouldn't deter teachers from giving students more demanding problems to solve. Pushing students just the right amount might make them fans of mathematics. "Give them problems that are welcoming but challenging," Ben told Bored Panda. "Math won't always feel easy – but it should feel approachable."
"Third, honor their thinking," Ben goes on. "Math is meant to sculpt our powers of logic, calculation, and reason – and to do that, you've got to appreciate the beauty of the raw material, all the fabulous intuitions and insights that students already have."
"Then, if all else fails, slap some dollar signs in front of the numbers," Ben recommends. "'Negative four' doesn't always capture the imagination. 'You owe me four bucks' always does."
