The American Mathematical Society's Feature Column is a monthly column written for a general audience and published by the AMS Public Awareness Office. I have written for the Feature Column from 2005 to the present.
2020
Pooling strategies for COVID-19 testing
Transmitting Data with Polar Codes
What's the 411?
2019
You're in for a Shock
Puppies, Kittens, and the Golden Ratio
Non-negative Matrix Factorizations
2018
Upgrading Slums Using Topology
Getting in Sync
Neural Nets and How They Learn
2017
How to Differentiate with a Computer
Untangling Your Square Dance
Patterns in Permutations
2016
Finding Holes in the Data
Game. SET. Polynomial.
Knot Quandaries Quelled by Quandles
2015
Petals, Flowers and Circle Packings
Game. SET. Line.
The Stable Marriage Problem and School Choice
2014
How to Grow and Prune a Classification Tree
Congressional Redistricting and Gerrymandering
How to Make a 3D Print
2013
Fedorov's Five Parallelohedra
The Frobenius Problem: How I bought Chicken McNuggets with exact change
Using Projective Geometry to Correct a Camera
2012
Who's Number 1? Hodge Theory Will Tell Us
It's a Small World After All
A (Very Short) Detour for the Traveling Salesman
2011
Arrangements and Duality or How I Learned to Slice a Ham and Cheese Sandwich
The Shadow Knows: How to measure time with a sundial
Aligning Sequence Reads to Solve the Genome Puzzle
2010
How many times do I need to shuffle this deck
Multiplication is easier when it's complex
Moving Remy in harmony: Pixar's use of harmonic functions
2009
Puzzling over Exact Cover Problems
We Recommend a Singular Value Decomposition
No Static at All: Frequency modulation and music synthesis
2008
Trees, Teeth, and Time: The mathematics of clock making
Percolation: Slipping through the cracks
Random Numbers: Nothing left to chance
2007
Pulling digits out of Pi
Image Compression: Seeing What's Not There
That knotty DNA
2006
How Google Finds Your Needle in the Web's Haystack
Voronoi Diagrams and a Day at the Beach
When kissing involves trigonometry
2005
Penrose tilings tied up in ribbons
Penrose tiles talk across miles
The center of population of the United States