It’s an eternal question for generations of math students: How am I going to use this in the real world? At Bates, Meredith Greer answers that question with an entire course, “Mathematics Across the ...

Listeners contacted us to correct the answer to a clue from last week's puzzle, giving NPR's Ayesha Rascoe and Weekend Edition puzzlemaster Will Shortz a lesson in trigonometry. OK, so hold on, Will.

Plot tan, cot, sec and csc on the interval [-2Pi, 2Pi]. (Note that these functions all have vertical asymptotes.) You should know these graphs well. The trigonometeric functions are all periodic, that ...