"A cleaning lady and her son have been charged over the death of a reclusive, multi-millionaire maths genius whose burned body was found dumped in a field."

• Math genius Walter Sartory (aged 73, retired nuclear scientist) uses math to get rich on stock market, $14 million to be precise.
• Sartory was a true savant who had schizophrenia and even had set up a sophisticated computer system to listen for alien life.
• Cleaning lady Willa Blanc and her son allegedly put his body in a large bin and driven it to Indiana, where it was burned. They pleaded not guilty.

"I quit (kinda)!
I've been thinking about it for awhile, and I have a lot of good reasons: I'm not having fun anymore, three times a week is too often, I'm not really all that funny, I'm not that much of an artist, my mom is starting to understand too much math because of this comic, etc. So for now, I've decided to let my Brown Sharpie pursue other hobbies while I focus on things that make me happy (like grad school! and beer! and fuzzy kitties!)."

• They factored the number RSA-768 on December 12th, 2009
• The number RSA-768 is from the RSA Challenge list as a representative 768-bit RSA modulus
• This result sets a new record for factoring general integers
• Math: Method used is the number field sieve factoring method
• Quoted from the paper: "We spent half a year on 80 processors on polynomial selection. This was about 3% of the main task, the sieving, which was done on many hundreds of machines and took almost two years."

"...Mr. Gardner was 42 and had never taken a math course beyond high school. He had struggled with calculus and considered himself poor at solving basic mathematical puzzles, let alone creating them. But when the publisher of Scientific American asked him if there might be enough material for a monthly column on "recreational mathematics," a term that sounded even more oxymoronic in 1956 than it does today, Mr. Gardner took a gamble."

• Education in math and science is important.
• Obama committed to moving country from middle to top of the pack in math education.

" You are more likely to be friends with someone who has more friends than with someone who has fewer friends. There are 12 people who have a friend who has 12 friends, but there is only one person who has a friend who has only one friend. And, of course, there is no one who has a friend who doesn't have any friend. Yet there is actually only one person who has 12 friends. So "12" gets counted only once when you compute the average number of friends that people have, but it gets counted 12 times when you compute the average number of friends that their friends have. Hence the seeming paradox that your friends have more friends than you do."

- Richard Heene makes experimental helium balloon
- Heene & wife freakout since their "son" may be in the basket
- crapload of publicity, balloon comes down, son not in there
- son was actually in the Heene house attic all along
- 4chan delivers pizza to balloon boy
- news now reporting the stunt was a hoax
- charges filed against Heene

"There is plenty of humor, a few movies, some great activities and explorations, and lots of math in Math Teachers at Play 17. Hope you enjoy reading these as much as I did. Thanks to everyone who submitted posts or answered my requests to include their work."

"In tests in Canada, women who were told that men and women do math equally well did much better than those who were told there is a genetic difference in math ability.

And women who heard there were differences caused by environment -- such as math teachers giving more attention to boys -- outperformed those who were simply reminded they were females.

The women who did better in the tests got nearly twice as many right answers as those in the other groups, explained Steven J. Heine, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver."

Each two-page spread has an excellent story about a mathematical principle, discovery, puzzle, or person. You can find more information about the book at amazon.com.

• 18+ years old
• College Grad
• Majored in Mathematics (of course :D)

• who live in one of the countries: Canada or United States