How to Free Your Inner Mathematician: Notes on Mathematics and Life

1 Mix up your routine, as cicadas with prime number cycles; 2 Grow in accessible directions, like Voronoi diagrams; 3 Rely on your reasoning abilities, because folded paper may reach the moon; 4 Define success for yourself, given Arrow's Impossibility Theorem; 5 Reach for the stars, just like Katherine Johnson; 6 Find the right match, as with binary numbers and computers; 7 Act natural, because of Benford's Law; 8 Resist comparison, because of chaos theory; 9 Look all around, as Archimedes did in life; 10 Walk through the problem, as on the Konigsborg bridges; 11 Untangle problems, with knot theory; 12 Consider all options, as the shortest path between two points is not always straight; 13 Look for beauty, because of Fibonacci numbers; 14 Divide and conquer, just like Riemann sums in calculus; 15 Embrace change, considering non-Euclidean geometry; 16 Pursue an easier approach, considering the Pigeonhole Principle; 17 Make an educated guess, like Kepler with his Sphere-packing Conjecture; 18 Proceed at your own pace, because of terminal velocity; 19 Pay attention to details, as Earth is an oblate spheroid; 20 Join the community, with Hilbert's 23 problems; 21 Search for like-minded math friends, because of the Twin Prime Conjecture; 22 Abandon perfectionism, because of the Hairy Ball Theorem; 23 Enjoy the pursuit, as Andrew Wiles did with Fermat's Last Theorem; 24 Design your own pattern, because of the Penrose Patterns; 25 Keep it simple whenever possible, since; 26 Change your perspective, with Viviani's Theorem; 27 Explore, on a Mobius strip; 28 Be contradictory, because of the infinitude of primes; 29 Cooperate when possible, because of game theory; 30 Consider the less-travelled path, because of the Jordan Curve Theorem; 31 Investigate, because of the golden rectangle; 32 Be okay with small steps, as the harmonic series grows without bound; 33 Work efficiently, like bacteriophages with icosahedral symmetry; 34 Find the right balance, as in coding theory; 35 Draw

Susan D'Agostino is a mathematician and writer whose essays have been published in Quanta Magazine, Scientific American, Financial Times, Nature, Undark, Times Higher Education, Chronicle of Higher Education, Math Horizons, Mathematics Teacher, and others. She earned her PhD in Mathematics from Dartmouth College, Master of Arts in Teaching Mathematics from Smith College, and BA in Anthropology from Bard College. She is a Council for the Advancement ofScience Writing Taylor/Blakeslee Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. Her website is www.susandagostino.com and her Twitter handle is @susan_dagostino.