Bill Wood

I made this mistake in getting a new A&W Ice Cream Sundae soda instead of root beer.

Avoid these senseless beverage traps.

Nice little calculus problem: You want to increase a number of the form x^y (x,y > 1) by adding a small amount to either the exponent or the base. Which is more efficient? 5^8, for example. #teachmath

“We must reject any negative solutions, of course, because there’s no such thing as negative time. Except in meetings.”

A student said she was having lasagna and another asked if it was homemade. Did you make the noodles? The sauce? If that's not homemade, how do we distinguish from prepackaged? Whence came a definition of home-assembled lasagna.

This is a perfect example of how mathematical definitions happen.

Every year on this day I wonder why Sony doesn't release Groundhog Day 2. Same film, just add a 2 to the title card. Advertise it straight up with the original trailers without comment.

They are just leaving money on the table.

Untangling Christmas lights reminds me why I didn’t stick with topology

They look like the same shapes in different p-metrics.

This was the semester that has made me accept that professoring is a different job than if was five years ago.

I think this means that if I use my 20% off coupon for a $10 book then it will cost $50.

Ill-timed wind gust grabbed my final exams and distributed them all across my street. Just spent 45 minutes frantically hunting white papers on white snow.

Only upside is these are finals and thus not returned, so I won't have to explain why they look like this.

I am in this post and I am fine with it. Now leave me alone.

"What do I need on the final to get a C-?"

The brazen indifference to everything I'm trying to do with my class doesn't bother me so much as that they can't to the algebra necessary to answer this question.

Now slip an innocent 1+ in front of the x^2 in the denominator.

I just finished grading exams. My students will be very grateful for this.

Assignment I might try next semester: have ChatGPT do one of my old exams and have the students grade it. #teachmath #mathsky

That origami course sounds quite mathy indeed. Author couldn't be bothered to learn what any of those words mean.

TIL the conversion ratio for miles to kilometers is very close to the golden ratio so you can estimate with the Fibonacci sequence: 5mi = 8km, 8mi=13km, etc

Another failed math pangram, although I’ll concede this one for being proper.

I am at an age where “I’m exhausted because I drank too much last night” means I drank a root beer after 7pm and had to get up three times to pee.

Yep. I teach 9 hours a week, therefore I work 9 hours a week. It's annoying with family, but a real problem that politicians think this too.

Spelling bee rejects the word CODOMAIN

Oh, come on!

Spelling Bee just doesn’t like math.

He's one of those actors who has several "definitive" roles depending on who you talk to -- My Dinner With Andre, Princess Bride, Star Trek DS9, Young Sheldon, and for my kids, Stinky and Dirty.

Boring answer, but Cayley’s Theorem. It was a revelation to me as a student that all groups live in symmetric groups.

Not great to save the porn years for last.

My hint would be: How much grading do you think I want to do?

ln 7x is a good one to wake them up a little.

Handy example I dumb-lucked into today as I had to conjure a vector angle problem on the fly: (1,2) and (3,1) make at a 45-degree angle.

This week gave me an idea for a stats problem: determine whether “missing class for a funeral” and “there is an exam in class” are independent events. I have some data they can use.

I’m pretty sure I have this in my basement somewhere