Marcus du Sautoy and some colleagues at Oxford developed the “Maths in the City” web site to reveal the mathematics embedded in urban environments. Visit the Maths in the City site at http://www.mathsinthecity.com/ to sample some of the mathematical wonders in the cities of Europe, Australia, the Middle East, Asia, and America. Add an entry spotlighting the math in your own city. Marcus du Sautoy is passionate about math but critical of the way it’s traditionally taught in school. He worries that math “has been dumbed down and made so anaemic that students are being put off taking it beyond the compulsory tick in the box.” What’s contributed to this condition, according to du Sautoy, and how can we remedy it? Explore some of du Sautoy’s texts on this topic, and then hear what high school teacher Dan Meyer had to say when he spoke at TEDxNYED in 2010: The Guardian: The secret life of numbers (06/22/2009) http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jun/23/maths-marcus-du-sautoy The Guardian: Without the big maths stories, our numbers are plummeting (06/02/2008) http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/03/maths.education TED: Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover.html Bring teachers and students together to talk about these ideas. What, if anything, constrains the ability to give math class a makeover—if in fact you agree that it needs one? Marcus du Sautoy http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/~dusautoy/ TED: Garrett Lisi on his theory of everything http://www.ted.com/talks/garrett_lisi_on_his_theory_of_everything.html Annenberg Media: Learning Math: Symmetry http://www.learner.org/courses/learningmath/geometry/session7/index.html