A term for brain-unfriendly or challenging math questions that generally evoke panic and fear, which may also be accompanied by recurring nightmares, among math-anxious or mathophobic students, parents, and teachers—the opposite of “mathematical slowies.”
For most educated folks, who lack the intelligence or training to solving math contests and olympiad questions, these mathematical toughies are off-putting or repugnant to them.
by Numerati January 24, 2025
When exposure to, or meditation on, the number π has the potential of bringing mental, emotional, or spiritual benefits to the practitioner, even those who pride themselves of not being a “math person.”
Like maggot therapy, pi therapy is inexpensively or therapeutically effective in soothing the oft-stressed geeky mind, which is often inundated with misinformation or disinformation coming from all angles of the information superhighway.
by Numerati July 01, 2024
One who has achieved far beyond what his average or below-average mathematical intelligence could allow him to do, by lying, bullshitting, scheming, pretending, or backstabbing—the mathematical equivalent of a racist-rapist-turned-fraud-felon who got elected, rejected, and reelected despite all the odds against him.
Guesstimate how many mathematical frauds make it bigly in the publishing industry worldwide every year.
by Numerati December 07, 2024
When incorporating Singapore’s bar model method—the problem-solving visualization strategy to tackle word problems—at the elementary school level and its aim to develop students’ pre-algebraic thinking skills (before they are introduced to formal algebra) are not often partially achievable or necessarily correlated in practice.
Wallet-friendly Singapore math textbooks, workbooks, and teachers’ resources on their own doesn’t guarantee problem-solving mastery—bar-modeling orthogonality seems to be a constant in many traditional American classrooms, often because of teachers’ or parents’ faux perception that a foreign math curriculum or publication is harder (or even inferior) than their local inch-deep-mile-wide one.
by Numerati December 05, 2024
When there is a hidden element of π residing in all humans (or maybe even animals), whether they know it or not, regardless of their experience of school math—that pi-mind consciousness that intuitively seems to be guided by some Higher Being to convey new insights about the “sacred number” to humanity or any living entity.
When someone puts themselves in a Zen-like or transcendental state, the chances of them experiencing “The pi in me” aha! are higher than when they’re constantly being bombarded with a deluge of sensory input.
by Numerati March 22, 2025
Math problems titles filled with oft-minimalist information that tend to put off or confuse math-anxious people, who may find them mentally nauseating or brain-unfriendly.
Like wasabi peas and sushis, wallet-friendly wasabi math titles from Asian and Communist countries would petrify the majority of K–12 American students and their teachers, who’re spoon-fed with drill-and-kill questions.
by Numerati November 25, 2024
Prime numbers that produce another prime number when they intimately come together—for example, when primes 2 and 3 have fun together, they produce the prime 23.
by Numerati August 13, 2024