The Best Writing on Mathematics 2019

This annual publication includes a collection of recently published journal papers from mathematics journals and blog posts as well as publications like the Scientific American and Nature.

The year’s finest mathematical writing from around the world

This annual anthology brings together the year’s finest mathematics writing from around the world. Featuring promising new voices alongside some of the foremost names in the field, The Best Writing on Mathematics 2019 makes available to a wide audience many articles not easily found anywhere else—and you don’t need to be a mathematician to enjoy them. These essays delve into the history, philosophy, teaching, and everyday aspects of math, offering surprising insights into its nature, meaning, and practice—and taking readers behind the scenes of today’s hottest mathematical debates.

Here, Moon Duchin explains how geometric-statistical methods can be used to design voting districts, Jeremy Avigad illustrates the growing use of computation in making and verifying mathematical hypotheses, and Kokichi Sugihara describes how to construct geometrical objects with unusual visual properties. In other essays, Neil Sloane presents some recent additions to the vast database of integer sequences he has catalogued, and Alessandro Di Bucchianico and his colleagues highlight how mathematical methods have been successfully applied to big-data problems. And there’s much, much more.

In addition to presenting the year’s most memorable math writing, this must-have anthology includes an introduction by the editor and a bibliography of other notable pieces on mathematics.

This is a must-read for anyone interested in where math has taken us—and where it is headed.