Brent Yorgey ‘04 has a beautifully formatted blog “dedicated to exploring beautiful mathematics.” Brent notes that:

There is tons of beautiful mathematics out there which is accessible without an advanced degree in mathematics — but not much of it is taught in high school, either because teachers do not have a good grasp of the mathematics outside their set curriculum, or because it is deemed “irrelevant” or “not useful”. While I agree that one goal of education is to make sure students acquire useful skills, certainly another goal is to arouse students’ wonder and curiosity — and this is where current mathematical education (at least in the U.S.) seems to fail so miserably. I doubt this little blog can ever really make up for such a big hole in modern math curricula, but at least I hope that a few students might read it and be inspired to consider that maybe — just maybe — math isn’t quite so boring as they thought…

Great stuff. I hope to convince Brent to do some guest posting at EphBlog as well, both with math items and with thoughts on being a math teacher. There are scores of students at Williams right now considering teaching, either as a career or as a first job after college. Many would be eager to read about Brent’s experiences.