mathbabe

I’m excited as always to see my buddy Jordan Ellenberg, who’s in town accepting a Guggenheim Fellowship.

You might have thought that Guggenheims were awarded to starving artists, and you would be mostly right, but they also give them out to a couple of math people each year as well.

Since Jordan has kids and I have kids, we got to talking about how fantastic our kids are, which led Jordan to show me this adorable video involving him and his son C.J.:

It’s in reference to the National Math Festival, which was held in April in D.C.. Jordan spoke there about his book How Not To Be Wrong, which I reviewed a while ago. A couple of comments:

• If you look carefully, you will also see my buddy Rebecca Goldin with one of her (many) adorable kids in the video,
• My favorite part (and Jordan’s) is where he puts his head inside a Fibonacci sequence, even though that makes no sense,
• My sons would never be this math positive. They enjoy talking about how much they hate school in general and math in particular.
• I’m kind of proud of how I’m raising them to be “independent thinkers,” though, which is what I call that.