When we communicate important numbers, there’s always a chance we’ll mistype, misspeak, or mishear them. Fortunately, there are mathy tricks for issuing numbers that can be checked for common mistakes!

In this week’s Ask a Mathematician, we look at an interesting pattern in the woodwork of the Seattle Storm’s basketball court in Climate Pledge Arena and similar pattern at the BECU Storm Center for Basketball Performance.

Many of the games we play depend on rolling dice, shuffling decks, or other random processes. But how can we get seemingly random outputs from deterministic devices like computers and smartphones? This week’s MIRL looks at random number generation and pseudorandomness.

In today’s Ask a Mathematician, we look at the theory of relativity.

You don't have to be a math whiz to turn everyday countdowns into powerful learning moments. From calculating days until Halloween at the dinner table to breaking big numbers into weeks and fractions, see how simple family conversations build real-world logic in this month’s Talking Math.

When writing chord progressions for a song, it often sounds more pleasing if each chord has something in common with the next. How can math help create a “nearby” chord palette?

In this week’s Ask a Mathematician, we look at the often blurry line between math and science.

When you use a search engine, the results come to you in an order and often the thing you are looking for is towards the top. There’s some math behind that!

While there’s some math in Seattle landmarks, there’s also plenty of math to be found in your Seattle neighborhood. Join me on a walk around my neighborhood, where I spot some interesting geometric and topological structures.

Want to turn everyday reading into an easy math lesson without adding more to your plate? Educator Erin Wahler-Cleveland shares a simple "parent ninja move" to naturally spark early math moments using your child’s favorite bedtime storybooks.

Stop signs are octagons and yield signs are triangles. What other shapes do we use?

In this week’s Ask a Mathematician, we look at the order of operations and how it came about.

If you’ve ever tried meticulously tearing an orange peel off as a single piece, this week's MIRL looks at one of the shapes you might end up with!

In this week’s Ask a Mathematician, we look a the ways letters were slowly introduced into math over the ages.

Want to turn everyday reading into an easy math lesson without adding more to your plate? Educator Erin Wahler-Cleveland shares a simple "parent ninja move" to naturally spark early math moments using your child’s favorite bedtime storybooks.

This week’s MIRL looks at some of the challenges in making a flat map from our spherical world.

In this week’s Ask a Mathematician, we look at Steven Stadnicki’s polyhex puzzle-a-day calendar.

Have you ever noticed that the hardest part of blowing up a balloon is at the beginning? There’s some math and science behind that!

In this week’s Ask a Mathematician, we look at a proof of the Pythagorean theorem, some generalizations, and its relationship with distances in 2D, 3D, and beyond.

How can math help make our world more vibrant? This week’s MIRL focuses on some of the math of colors!