By Joanne Helperin | July 31, 2020
Dr. Sara Ochoa grew up in rural Calhoun, Louisiana. Like many children, she dreamed of being an animal doctor. She got plenty of practice thanks to the variety of wildlife in her area — and her open-minded parents.
By Mathnasium | June 29, 2020
Scott Heger’s company, Blair Adhesives, makes hundreds of different products, but there’s one product category that gets all the attention.
By Mathnasium | May 26, 2020
From navigation to fuel calculations, math is essential to sailing the sea
Ah, the romance of the sea. It beckons us from the time we’re young. Children play captain (or pirate), imagining swashbuckling adventures, colorful foreign ports and exotic new cultures. Young people typically abandon their dreams of the sea for more practical pursuits, but not Robert Quick.
By Mathnasium | January 2, 2020
Launch Director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the first woman to oversee a NASA liftoff and launch team.
Photo credit: NASA
We’re pretty excited about Charlie Blackwell-Thompson. A spaceflight engineer and veteran of the Space Shuttle era, she’s the first female launch director at Kennedy Space Center and the first woman to oversee a NASA liftoff and launch team — specifically, for the Artemis program. Artemis’ mission is to land the first woman and the next man on the moon by 2024 and to establish sustainable, ongoing exploration by 2028. Once that’s accomplished, NASA will take the next giant leap by sending astronauts to Mars. Artemis, named for Apollo’s twin sister, includes the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket — the most powerful ever built — and the Orion spacecraft.
By Mathnasium | December 20, 2018
(UCLA Anthropologist P. Jeffrey Brantingham directs the UC Mathematical and Simulation Modeling of Crime project and co‐founded PredPol – The Predictive Policing Company.)
Jeffrey Brantingham’s predictive policing software helps protect one out of every 33 people in the U.S.
During his 20 years digging up the bones of early humans in Tibet and Mongolia, anthropologist Jeffrey Brantingham never thought he’d end up fighting crime in the big city.
By Mathnasium | August 20, 2018
Photo: Lynne Harty
You don’t have to understand math in order to make great music, but it helps. Music is intrinsically mathematical, and the two disciplines have a symbiotic relationship.
By Mathnasium | June 18, 2018
If you want to build the “most played PC video game” in all of North America and Europe, you need math. Lots of it.
Sure, computers do the heavy lifting, but if you don’t understand how linear algebra works, it’s game over.
So says software engineer Eric Friedman, who works on League of Legends (LoL), the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game that’s topped the charts since its debut in 2009.
By Mathnasium | May 21, 2018
Might better treatments be available for people with ADHD, depression, Alzheimer’s Disease, or schizophrenia if we could turn on—or off—the right genes in the brain?
By Mathnasium | February 12, 2018
Every single day, Hillel Smith uses math to create art. It’s not “fractal art” or computer-driven design. He simply needs math to produce the art itself—everything from huge outdoor murals to inflatable sculptures.
“At a basic level, having an understanding of geometry is practical, making things at a size that can be framed, or knowing how far a can of paint will go,” he said. “The challenge is working with projects that require a higher level of art thinking, such as my pixelated pieces and some of the mural projects. I do a lot of ‘solving for X,’ dimension analysis, ratios and proportions, fractions, and unit conversions.”
Before I came to Mathnasium, I could sum up everything I felt about math in one word: 'EVIL!' I hated math. ... Mathnasium has been my safe haven. They truly have shown me the light when it came to addressing my fear and provided me with the tools that I need to rebuild my prior knowledge so that I won't forget it. Math is no longer a subject I shy away from but it is a subject I can boldly accept and understand.
Roxanne, 12th grade
