Tim Ricchuiti

Just two number lines, placed at right angles to each other.

And yet this simple idea rewired mathematics. Suddenly equations could draw shapes, and pictures could encode relationships.

Is Descartes' coordinate plane pound-for-pound the most powerful mathematical idea ever?

feeling like a hundred zillion low-precision dot products are beautiful, might delete later

YouTube video by polymathematic Did Harvard Really Ask This on Their Entrance Exam?

An interesting, though not necessarily historical, Harvard entrance exam question. youtu.be/bqpZIzleauc?...

ChatGPT, you sweet summer child.

If your child says “ooh, I want the spicy ones” when she sees “flavor-blasted” goldfish, you have failed as a parent.

(It’s me, I have failed as a parent.)

Seventh grade a little early for integration between two curves

Modeling the math behind this incredible bar bet

It's funny, because this is in fact the entire underpinning of differential calculus: changes are small compared to levels.

A beautiful little reminder of the curse of knowledge and what can be done about it as a teacher.

In Trump’s America, you don’t release the numbers. The numbers release YOU!

Solving a trig equation in the least rigorous way possible.

I'm a day late, but not a hypotenuse short on this one. Why 7/24/25 is (was) a special day, and what it shows us about other special right triangles.

you're telling me this salt came from the sea?!?

Animated me. Yay or nay?

My favorite optical illusion

Felix Felicis is adderall for wizards

Getting so into poetry now that ChatGPT can read it for me and tell me what it was like

How would you compute 42² + 126² in your head? Spot that 126 = 3 × 42, and the sum becomes 42² + (3×42)² = 10 × 42² = 17,640. A tough-looking problem turns into one quick multiplication—if you catch the pattern. #MentalMath #MathTricks #SumOfSquares

this is why I only eat small portions of skeleton

for me, personally, if something happened after something else, it's quite clear it happened because of the something else.

You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.

Define two points, say, A and B. Then call polygon(A,B) and it’ll create a line segment between them.

🎉🎉

Love that giant red tariff button. Not sure why it says “don’t press!”

11th worst three-day performance of all time...so far.

The Minecraft movie is perhaps the worst movie I’ve ever seen in a theater. Kids seemed to like it. C’est la vie.

Taking my kids to the mall

When life’s going good…

Y’all like math on this app?

I asked ChatGPT not to use any em-dashes in an email it wrote for me, and it didn't. It did use the em-dash in its response to me instead.

ChatGPT's got jokes