S4E06: From mathochistic to mathcurious w/ A.K. Whitney

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This one’s for all the adults out there who are like “hmmm maybe it’s not too late to learn a little math…”! On today’s episode Vanessa talks to journalist A.K. Whitney, who went back to school at 38 to learn math and chronicled it in Cosmopolitan, The Washington Post, and her own podcast/website delightfully titled “The Mathochism Project”. She is basically the definition of overcoming math trauma and making it less of a stigma - but how did she do it? Why don’t more people do it? And how can we make math less traumatic for women and girls?

About A.K. (Twitter) & The Mathochism Project: (Twitter, Website)

A.K. Whitney is a journalist with 25 years of experience in print and online. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Cosmopolitan and more. She was a regular contributor to Noodle, an educational website, writing mostly about society’s fraught relationship with math, which is the subject of her website, The Mathochism Project.

Show notes:

• A.K.’s article for Cosmopolitan: How I Finally Got Over My Fear of Math
• A.K’s article for The Washington Post: Why did I give up on math? Ask my mom.
• The Ohio State MOOC calculus course that A.K. recommends
• An article about “the cult of genius” from the mathematician, Jordan Ellenberg, who coined the term
• The CBC article explaining why saying “it’s not rocket science” isn’t fair to other professions

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