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Math with Bad Drawings

mathwithbaddrawings.com

Lover of math. Bad at drawing.

Math

’15’20’25
Posts
507 from 8 Apr 2013 to 11 Mar 2026
Posting
now and then (1 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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2026 1

  1. Puzzle Planet.

2025 15

  1. Curves to curve by.
  2. 10 best triangles of the 21st century (so far).
  3. Oxbridge of America
  4. Is math discovered or invented?
  5. The mathematics of “are we there yet?”
  6. Ask the Algorithm
  7. A mathematician’s coming-of-age story.
  8. Literary genres as equations.
  9. Fashion tips for writing math.
  10. A world without zero. (February 2025 in bad drawings)
  11. “Find my age” puzzles (but with all true facts).
  12. January 2025 (with bad drawings)
  13. The illusory consensus of math reform.
  14. Puzzles of strange coinage (increasing in difficulty).
  15. A survey of recent works in Oulipo.

2024 46

  1. Adrienne Rich, mathematician.
  2. 2024 in math puzzles.
  3. Good Karl Weierstrass
  4. A sequence of puzzles (about sequences).
  5. November 2024 (with bad drawings)
  6. What’s the use of math history?
  7. Proof as a form of literature.
  8. Mathematical plot devices.
  9. October 2024 (with bad drawings).
  10. Please deface my books.
  11. Of trashcans and thimbles.
  12. Edgar Degas, mathematician.
  13. Key theorems about (learning) calculus.
  14. A tale of two calculus books
  15. September 2024 (with bad drawings).
  16. An old math joke comes to life.
  17. An axiom of choice is an axiom of hope.
  18. The same old pieces of colored glass.
  19. The social life of a graph theorist.
  20. Incompleteness.
  21. Advice for teaching a huge online class.
  22. Back-to-school materials for your PhD in Math.
  23. The house of symbols and the tree of ideas.
  24. August 2024 (with bad drawings)
  25. Bacterial growth: even more exponential than you thought.
  26. The doomed love of the pure mathematician.
  27. The dawn of nothing.
  28. Beauty is in the i (and the e, and the pi) of the beholder.
  29. NYT wins the gold medal for medal visualization.
  30. What’s missing in math? Witty, insightful quotes.
  31. Which “mean” do you mean?
  32. July 2024 (with Bad Drawings)
  33. A roundup of recent books on math
  34. “Let’s iterate on that.”
  35. The Finances of the American Household, in 3 Charts
  36. Kind vs. nice.
  37. Is this the silliest scoring system ever?
  38. Is the derivative a rhetorical intensifier?
  39. On abstraction.
  40. Math for English Majors
  41. What’s the opposite of mathematics?
  42. Quotable Mathematics
  43. The Puzzle of the Prankster Twins
  44. A math teacher’s advice for parents.
  45. Why did you round 3560 to 3500 instead of 3600?
  46. A riddle about jigsaw puzzles.

2023 11

  1. The Battlestar Galactica Theory of Math Education
  2. Should math class be hard?
  3. Data Science Contest: Which U.S. Cities are the True Twins?
  4. What I’ve Been Reading
  5. Mathematicians Play “Set”
  6. A Brief Collection of Math Metaphors in Literature
  7. Err, and err, and err again; but less, and less, and less.
  8. Is “data science” an academic discipline?
  9. The Other Golden Ratios
  10. Paperback Writer
  11. Solo Flights: A Free Companion Text to “Math Games with Bad Drawings”

2022 10

  1. Optimizing your life without losing your soul.
  2. On parents, children, and a newborn book of mathematical games.
  3. Confessions of a Luddite mathematician.
  4. I can’t multiply 2573 by 389.
  5. Transitivity and its failures.
  6. Two ways to play chess. Also, two ways to live.
  7. A theory of trios.
  8. A Love Story of Machine Learning
  9. What makes a great puzzle? Five books, five answers.
  10. A book of deep, easy-to-play mathematical games (and why they matter).

2021 24

  1. NHL, Please Fix Your Standings
  2. A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems
  3. The SI Unit for Cuteness.
  4. The Horrors of log(log(log(t)))
  5. The Seven Deadly Sin(e)s
  6. Your digit-swapping birthday.
  7. dAlice/dt in Wonderland
  8. Books I Loved in 2021 (first half)
  9. Road Signs for Mathematics
  10. “Simplifying” is subjective. Also, crucial.
  11. If Fermat Had Wider Margins
  12. Kafka Explains Math Education
  13. Advice for snobs.
  14. When a trillion dice are no better than a dozen.
  15. He invented calculus, but you could smoke him at Monopoly.
  16. Your probabilistic personality.
  17. Against mathematical proof.
  18. How lectures came to be.
  19. Advice to Math Teachers Joining Twitter
  20. A year behind in math.
  21. Bad exams, great class: an unusual case study in excellent teaching
  22. Is a zebra black with white stripes, or white with black stripes?
  23. Humble Alternatives to Daylight Savings Time
  24. Defining “Cat” Without the Cat

2020 20

  1. Books I Loved in 2020
  2. Three Different Ways of Calling Math “Dry”
  3. The Uncanny Wisdom of Twitter Polls
  4. Democracy isn’t math. But it isn’t NOT math.
  5. What Graphs Reveal (If You Give Them Time)
  6. Math Games with Bad Drawings
  7. Six Strategic Pen-and-Paper Games (from a Strange and Bottomless Mind)
  8. 11 Geometry Puzzles That Drive Mathematicians to Madness
  9. More Great Ways to Annoy a Mathematician
  10. Kids Say the Darnedest Cubics
  11. $500 Million for Bloomberg Equals… What for You or Me?
  12. A Compendium of Cool Internet Math Things
  13. “What Makes a Great Teacher?” Answered by 4 Great Teachers
  14. The Truly Common Core
  15. Felt-Tip Geometry
  16. STEM Academia: The Game
  17. The Mystery of the Super Bowl Match-Ups
  18. Six new geometry puzzles. How many can you solve?
  19. The Game of Snakes
  20. Books I Loved in 2019

2019 45

  1. The Incalculable Joy of Fermi Questions
  2. 366 Days of Math
  3. Why Does Everything Make Us Feel Old?
  4. Geometry Puzzles for a Winter’s Day
  5. “Inflation” Is Not One Thing
  6. Inequalities Are Not Broken Equations
  7. Let’s All Burn Calculus in Effigy
  8. The Anti-Calculator Puzzle
  9. The Novelist and the Gasket
  10. Lined Paper from Another Dimension
  11. An Open Letter to Microsoft Excel
  12. The Tilted Twin (and other delights)
  13. Who are the Foxes and Hedgehogs of Mathematics?
  14. The Quiet Revolution of the “Math Gals” T-Shirt
  15. The Four Words at the Heart of Calculus
  16. Who Approves of Approval Voting?
  17. What’s the Radius of a Day?
  18. Instagram-Ready Graphs (Made of String Cheese, Hairpins, and Burnt Matches)
  19. How to End a Proof
  20. Why Isn’t 1 a Prime Number?
  21. The Adventures of Captain Math
  22. The Best Joke I’ve Ever Written (according to my wife Taryn)
  23. Change is the Only Constant
  24. Green + Green = Pink
  25. Why Baseball Statistics Matter
  26. Why Teachers Should Read John Urschel’s Book
  27. Errors in “Math with Bad Drawings”
  28. Misconceptions in Astronomical History
  29. Let’s Rename the Pythagorean Theorem
  30. My Favorite Math Comic That Isn’t a Math Comic
  31. The Electoral College, According to a Math Teacher
  32. The Case Against Galileo
  33. The Three-Body Problem for Dishes
  34. A Biography of Archimedes, Written Entirely in Anagrams for “Archimedes”
  35. If Dr. Seuss Knew Calculus
  36. Truly the Natural Base
  37. The Strange Sympathies of the Teacher
  38. The Serious Truth About Silly Mistakes
  39. The Carnival of Mathematics
  40. When Does Insurance Fail?
  41. The Persistent Pedantry of the Mathematical Mind
  42. Choose Your Superpower
  43. A Brief Case Against Limits
  44. Books I Loved in 2018, Organized Into Mini-Genres
  45. Thirdsday: the Holiday That’s 33.33…% Better Than Any Other

2018 38

  1. Haircut Optimization
  2. A Glut of Math Jokes
  3. 13 Universities in 15 Days (with Bad Drawings)
  4. When the Math is Pretty But the Truth Ain’t
  5. I’m Going on a Random Walk
  6. The Test of the Parallels
  7. Twenty Questions (Of Maddening, Delicious Geometry)
  8. Fractal Carpet Pricing
  9. What a Mathematical Pirate Says
  10. Fermat’s Last Paraphrase
  11. Your Earliest Mathematical Memory
  12. A City on a Polar Grid (and 15 other math cartoons)
  13. Errors No More Egregious Than Confusing “Million” and “Billion”
  14. The Bubble Under the Mathematical Rug
  15. Poem on a Pyramid
  16. The Teacher Who Only Says Gimme
  17. The Forgotten Dream of the Fields Medal
  18. A Brief History of Gregor Mendel
  19. Why It’s So Hard to Surprise a Mathematician
  20. Powers Great and Small
  21. Math Explained through Anagrams
  22. Four Ways of Thinking About a Line
  23. If Fairy Tales Were Graphs
  24. My Favorite Student-Advisor Moment
  25. The Book
  26. Matrix Jokes
  27. The Hyperbole of Elliptic Geometry (and 14 Other Math Cartoons)
  28. Tales of Pythagoras
  29. The Third Millennium of Those “Find My Age” Algebra Problems
  30. Love Poems for Mathematicians
  31. The Limitations of Genies (and 18 other math cartoons)
  32. The ABC Book of e
  33. The Know-Nothing Oscar Pool
  34. The Reluctant Gatekeeper
  35. The Twitter Logo is Just Circles
  36. Math Classes Every College Should Teach
  37. Compass Constructions Made Easy
  38. A Borrowed Joke (and 15 other math cartoons)

2017 61

  1. Things to Know About the Year 2018
  2. The Terrible Truth About Dreidel
  3. The Three Barriers to Deep Thinking in School
  4. Doughnut Price is a Topological Invariant (and 13 other math cartoons)
  5. Epitaphs in the Graveyard of Mathematics
  6. What To Do When the Whole Class is Failing
  7. The Math with Bad Drawings Reader Survey!
  8. A Mathematician is Grateful For…
  9. A Mathematician’s Resume-Building Tips
  10. A World Without the Number 6
  11. The World’s Spookiest Math Stories
  12. Fake an Answer and Run Away
  13. 5 Ways to Troll Your Neural Network
  14. Mathematicians Make Pasta and Eat Corn
  15. The Professor vs. the NSA
  16. Insatiable for Updates
  17. No, There’s No Nobel in Math
  18. The Fortune of Mathematicians
  19. 25 Are Here, and 1 Is Not
  20. A Probability Puzzle That You’ll Get Wrong
  21. The State of Being Stuck
  22. A Symphony with an Irrational Time Signature
  23. Literature’s Greatest Opening Lines, as Written By Mathematicians
  24. The Noncombustive Property of Skulls
  25. There Is No Perfect Teacher (Just a Bunch of Great Ones)
  26. The Hottest Tablet on the Market (Babylonian category)
  27. Everything Sounds Better with Mathematics
  28. The Case for the Brambles
  29. Three Rules for Tackling a World-Famous Math Problem
  30. Insurance Schemes the World Needs
  31. A Mathematician Looks at a Cat
  32. Never Buy Two Lottery Tickets
  33. 100-Word Stories
  34. Math-staches
  35. What Do You Do With 11-to-13-Year-Olds?
  36. Mathematicians Explain Sports to Each Other
  37. The Emergency Black-Box Checklist
  38. Life, in Coordinate Planes
  39. Commencement Speeches for Mathematicians
  40. Is Algebra Just a Series of Footnotes to the Distributive Property?
  41. The Three Phases of the Mathematical Life
  42. The Joy of Slightly Fishy Proofs
  43. Summer Blockbusters from a Nerdier Timeline
  44. Dear Mathematician Who Discovered Me…
  45. Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Series”
  46. The Professor with a Billion Students
  47. It’s Obvious Why Students Cheat; We Just Can’t Agree on the Reason
  48. 250 Posts, Still Can’t Draw
  49. Logic Made Easy
  50. If Math Wrote Letters
  51. Limericks for Mathematicians
  52. Lines Beyond y = mx + b
  53. The Baby Name Book for Variables
  54. Flags of Mathland
  55. The Island of Democrats and Republicans
  56. How to Tell a Mathematician You Love Them
  57. History’s Most Evil Mathematicians
  58. A Guide to Mathematical Emotions
  59. Life, in Venn Diagrams
  60. Why Are Mathematicians So Bad at Arithmetic?
  61. 1.2 Trillion Ways to Play the Same Sudoku

2016 55

  1. Why the Number Line Freaks Me Out
  2. Imagine All the Numbers…
  3. The Catchy Nonsense of “Two Negatives Make a Positive”
  4. Viral Math News Stories
  5. Test: Do You Have Test Anxiety?
  6. The Further Mishaps of Young Gottfried Leibniz
  7. Other Ways to Carve Up the Math Curriculum
  8. Pick a Truly Random Number
  9. Mathematical Alternatives to the Electoral College
  10. The Student-to-Teacher Dictionary
  11. What I Tell Myself After a Bad Lesson
  12. Why “Competitive Marketplaces” are an Awkward Fit for Education
  13. Who Subsumes the Subsumers?
  14. When You Learn a New Language to Read a Single Book
  15. Sometimes the Noise is Signals, Too
  16. Collaboration (in Cartoons)
  17. The Essence of the HLF, in One Story
  18. 21 Essential Quotes from Sir Michael Atiyah
  19. The Universal Language (in Translation)
  20. On a Single Piece of Paper, Explain Your Research Area
  21. In a Quaint German Town, Mathematicians Converge
  22. If NFL Referees Behaved Like Academic Referees
  23. The Problem with Infinite Timelines
  24. Math Exams with Only One Question
  25. A Graphical Compendium of Changes From My Lifetime
  26. How do you master the rhythm of the logs?
  27. If Euclid Became an Oak
  28. How to Count to the Largest Number Ever Used
  29. UK vs. US: Who’s got the right way to teach math(s)?
  30. The Peacock-Tail Theory of AP Calculus
  31. Why Not to Trust Statistics
  32. We Hold These Mathematical Truths to Be Self-Evident
  33. I’m Not Just a Dot
  34. What Students See When They Look at Algebra
  35. 50 Killed, or 49?
  36. A Quadratic of Solace (or, Maybe Math Class Has a Purpose, Question Mark?)
  37. Where Does Your College Tuition Go?
  38. Ways to Answer the Question “Will This Be on the Test?”
  39. “Explanation is work for second-rate minds,” said the monster.
  40. The Essence of Mathematics, in One Beatles Song
  41. Symbols that Math Urgently Needs to Adopt
  42. Math is Crazy Hard to Define
  43. MBA: Master of Business Arts
  44. The Accidental Fraction Brainbuster
  45. A New Favorite Puzzle
  46. Decimal-Crazed Lunatics
  47. The Pi Day Recipe Book
  48. Why You Need Math: A Guide
  49. Why the Math Curriculum Makes No Sense
  50. FAQs about Self-Reference
  51. How to Edit Your Math Pessimism
  52. Math Books I Wish I Had on My Shelf
  53. The Number Line: A Journey
  54. Simplify!
  55. Unfortunate Metaphors for Teaching

2015 47

  1. A Mathematician’s New Year’s Resolutions
  2. Good Mathematician vs. Great Mathematician
  3. What Level of Teaching is Right for Me?
  4. Report Cards for Famous Mathematicians
  5. 9 Questions That Show How Common Core Math is Ruining America
  6. There’s No Such Thing as Triangles
  7. If We Talked About Other Subjects the Way We Talk About Math
  8. The Differentiation: A Survivor’s Tale
  9. The Quixotic Search for a “Fair” Math Test
  10. Counting to Five Is Harder Than You Think
  11. Practice Math Like a Baby
  12. Why I’ve Stopped Doing Interviews for Yale
  13. What Does Probability Mean in Your Profession?
  14. 13 Trig Functions You Need to Memorize Right Now
  15. The Exponential Bait and Switch
  16. The Mathematician’s Haiku Book
  17. The Smartest Dumb Error in the Great State of Colorado
  18. Oliver Sacks Knows What It Means to Teach
  19. An Open Letter to Benedict Carey
  20. Where the Laws No Longer Hold
  21. The Strange Music of the Harmonic Series
  22. Everything Is Linear (Or, the Ballad of the Symbol Pushers)
  23. Infinity Plus One: Please Check Your Intuitions at the Front Desk
  24. Mathemacomics
  25. US vs. UK: Who Grades Students?
  26. A Technique is Just a Trick That Went Viral
  27. Status Update from a Frustrated Mathematician
  28. One-Word Math Classes
  29. US vs. UK: Mathematical Terminology
  30. America Will Run Out Of Good Questions By 2050
  31. A Math Teacher’s Guide to Explaining Technology to Your Parents
  32. Statisticomics
  33. Metric Time
  34. The Math Ceiling: Where’s your cognitive breaking point?
  35. The Newcomb Paradox
  36. She Wants Us to Study for Math
  37. The Math Major Who Never Reads Math
  38. The Secret to All Areas
  39. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Parabola
  40. Why Do We Pay Pure Mathematicians?
  41. The Math Learner’s Checklist
  42. The Church of the Right Answer
  43. Fearing the Unknown
  44. The “Word Problem” Problem
  45. Are You a Dish-Washing Robot?
  46. Number Smoothies
  47. How to Avoid Thinking in Math Class

2014 76

  1. And Equality for All
  2. The Religions of Academia
  3. The Sixth Sense for Multiplication
  4. Inefficient Spaceships
  5. Don’t Let a Mathematician Write Your Political Slogans
  6. Once, There Weren’t Numbers
  7. The Skeptic’s Horoscope
  8. Wrong But Not Stupid
  9. If Trigonometric Functions Wrote Letters to Each Other
  10. The Hard-to-Tell Story of the High School Classroom
  11. How Science and Math See Each Other
  12. Scenes from the “Real World” Where Math is Useful
  13. If the U.S. Congress Got to Legislate Physical Laws
  14. Mad-Lib Mathematics
  15. The Starbucks Experience, in Graphs
  16. The Lesson I Learned from Hating on the SAT’s Guessing Policy
  17. Elegant, Simple, Coherent, and… Oh Yeah, Totally Wrong
  18. Letters from a Calculus Class
  19. “Dead Poets Society” for Skeptics (or, How to Inspire Your Way into a Godawful Mess)
  20. The Death of Science Fiction
  21. Art Museum in Utopia
  22. One in a Million
  23. Your Own Biathlon
  24. Random Victories
  25. The Voldemort of Calculus Classes
  26. Nonstandard Dancing
  27. Wealth, Acclaim, and Fancy Catered Lunches (or, Why I’m a Teacher)
  28. Ray Bradbury is My Anti-Vonnegut.
  29. When Not Memorizing Gets in the Way of Learning
  30. The Self-Pity Paradox
  31. Playing to Lose (or, What Mucking Around with Sports Rulebooks Has to Do with Math)
  32. To the Class of 2014
  33. Mailbag: STEM Stereotypes, Intellectual Inadequacy, and the Crocodile Tears of the Math Student
  34. I think the SAT’s scoring system is gibberish.
  35. Star Trek with Bad Drawings (by me, age 6)
  36. Descartes’ PB&J (or, the Clever Idea at the Heart of High School Math)
  37. Nostalgia, in 5 Graphs
  38. Does hating math make you bad at it?
  39. Why should we use proofs in the first place?
  40. Please Don’t Beam Me Up, Scotty
  41. The Mathematical Dialect Quiz
  42. Math is always hard… until it isn’t.
  43. Math Objects That Look Like Foods, Depending How Hungry I Am
  44. Physicists give the best analogies.
  45. The Psychic Card Trick
  46. Minus Signs
  47. The Calculus of History
  48. The New Math Teacher
  49. Anxiety, Mathematics, and Words of Kindness
  50. A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.
  51. A Teaching Philosophy I’m Not Ashamed Of
  52. The Argue-About-Anything Club
  53. Sorting the Tools from the Toys
  54. The Four Operations of Arithmetic
  55. The Real Bracketology
  56. Ain’t No Party Like a Topologist Party
  57. Teaching as Self-Sacrifice
  58. Mailbag #3: Quadratic Poems, Perfect Teachers, and the Controversial Equation of Ugly-Funny
  59. How to Talk to a Mathematician
  60. Scary Statistics
  61. Who Cheating Hurts
  62. Why I Don’t Trust Anyone’s “Perfect” School Model
  63. Permu-Combi-What-Now? (Or, the Mathematics of My Wedding Playlist)
  64. The Loneliest Number
  65. Confessions of a Math Major
  66. Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Senior, Rebirth, Reckoning…
  67. Mailbag! (Doing Math in Your Head, Being Satisfied with Low Grades, and the Remarkable “Ghraph of Stupidity” )
  68. The Mathematician and the Unfinished Coffee
  69. The Math Aficionado’s Guide to High-Fives
  70. 39 Ways to Love Math
  71. Will you move in with me… and this puppy?
  72. If I Ran the Bank
  73. Undiscovered Math
  74. Interpreting Your Students’ Quiz Answers (An Illustrated Guide)
  75. Big, Bigger, and Big-Big-Bigger
  76. To-Do Complacency

2013 58

  1. Blaming the Last Guy
  2. Mailbag! (or, I Reply to Your Google Search Terms)
  3. 12 Days of Christmas, the Hard Way
  4. The 23rd-Best Sandwich I’ve Ever Had
  5. Whiteboards: A Love Story
  6. Her phone number is pi?
  7. The Teacher-Centric Universe (or, Galileo Would Be Ashamed)
  8. Right Before the Quiz
  9. Headlines from a Mathematically Literate World
  10. The Master, the Pupil, and the Clumsy Game of Chess
  11. Tic-Tac-Toe Puzzles (and the Difference Between a Puzzle and a Game)
  12. So Why Did You Go Into Teaching? (8 Ways Not to Answer)
  13. The Patterns in the Stonework
  14. The Mountain Where Rain Never Falls
  15. Learning to rock-climb is changing how I’ll teach math.
  16. The Wise Monkey
  17. The Student Every Teacher Dreams About
  18. The Swindler’s Coin
  19. Two-Column Proofs that Two-Column Proofs are Terrible
  20. The Riddle of the Odorless Incense
  21. The Mental Machinery of the Chess Master
  22. The Blindfold and the Chestnuts
  23. The Bear in the Moonlight
  24. 20 Easy Steps for Trading Up from a Paper Clip to a House
  25. Black Boxes (or: Just Say No to Voodoo Formulas)
  26. A Math Professor Consults on a Hollywood Movie
  27. Is Memorization Necessary, Evil, or Both?
  28. Student Engagement, Method #47
  29. The Humor Writers and the Too-Big Sofa
  30. The Human and the Cosmic
  31. Math Experts Split the Check
  32. The Kaufman Decimals
  33. 0.999…. and the Debate that Repeats Forever
  34. A Conversation That Made My Day
  35. Iron Man 3 Outsold the Entire Book-Publishing Industry
  36. History’s Greatest Chess Matches
  37. Learning is a Fluorescent Light
  38. A Fight with Euclid
  39. Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe
  40. How Fast is Exponential Growth? (Or, Yao Ming Confronts the Vastness of the Universe)
  41. Three Sentiments (or, Ode to the School Year)
  42. Explain It To Me
  43. How to Remember Concavity
  44. Calculus Joke
  45. Following Recipes
  46. The Quadratic Formula Must Die! (or, Long Live the Quadratic Formula!)
  47. A Ray of Light
  48. The Graph Factory
  49. Why can’t you divide by zero?
  50. What did you get for #9? I got a snake.
  51. Degrees vs. Radians
  52. What It Feels Like to Have Wonderful Readers
  53. What It Feels Like to Be Bad at Math
  54. The Disease That Can Strike Anyone
  55. The Anxieties of Hermit Crabs
  56. Stupid Graphs!
  57. Fistfuls of Sand (or, Why It Pays to Be a Stubborn Teacher)
  58. What I Show My Students When They Get the Right Answer for the Wrong Reason