Ask Dr. Math

Talking about Ask Dr. Math itself.

What Happened to Ask Dr. Math?

In January and February of this year, the entire Math Forum site, including Ask Dr. Math, was first moved from http://mathforum.org/ to https://www.nctm.org/tmf/, and then made inaccessible to non-members, by its current owner, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. We are hoping that at least some of this material (the pages we often link …

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What It Takes to Be a Math Doctor

In the Ask Dr. Math service, new volunteers went through a period of training (“internship”), first demonstrating their ability to write effectively about math with some example problems, and then answering actual questions under supervision, discussing their answers with a mentor online before they were actually sent out. Once our reliability was confirmed, we were …

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Why I Became a Math Doctor

While I was setting up The Math Doctors site a year ago, I ran across the following email I received in 1998 inviting people to become Math Doctors. It illustrates well the ethos of the team: In the fall of 1994 the Math Forum at Swarthmore College (then the Geometry Forum) started an email program …

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A Sample of Ask Dr. Math, Part 2: Questions Outside of School

In the first post, I gave a small sampling of questions we’ve had from students, parents, and teachers, all related to school, and discussed how we like to deal with these. But we also get many questions with no direct relation to school. These may come from people who actually use math in their work …

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