Math with Bad Drawings
mathwithbaddrawings.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2013
Ben Orlin writes about math with cartoon-style drawings, covering games, statistics, and how mathematicians think.
What HN saysCommenters recommend it as a good, lesser-known math blog and link posts like the number line one and good versus great mathematician.
67HN people shared it
17linked it in comments
82stories submitted
1.7Kstory points
4 months agolast shared
2013people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1The State of Being Stuck9 people · 17 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 2Ultimate Tic Tac Toe7 people · 788 points · first shared 2013 · 123 comments on HN
- 3Why Do We Pay Pure Mathematicians?7 people · 31 points · first shared 2015 · 1 comments on HN
- 4Why Not to Trust Statistics5 people · 28 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 5Math with Bad Drawings5 people · 1 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 6Why are mathematicians so bad at arithmetic? (2017)3 people · 113 points · first shared 2017 · 124 comments on HN
- 7Why I’ve Stopped Doing Interviews for Yale3 people · 13 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 8How to Tell a Mathematician You Love Them (2017)2 people · 140 points · first shared 2017 · 15 comments on HN
- 9The Math Ceiling: Where’s your cognitive breaking point?2 people · 20 points · first shared 2015 · 3 comments on HN
- 10How to Troll Your Neural Network2 people · 5 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 11A Brief Case Against Limits2 people · 3 points · first shared 2019 · 1 comments on HN
- 12Good Mathematician vs. Great Mathematician2 people · 2 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 13The number line freaks me out (2016)1 people · 137 points · first shared 2023 · 145 comments on HN
- 14Twenty Questions Of Maddening, Delicious Geometry1 people · 133 points · first shared 2018 · 9 comments on HN
- 15Math with Bad Drawings1 people · 114 points · first shared 2022 · 7 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
dilippkumar · 2020-05-28
I am happily addicted to NetNewsWire 5.0 + Feedbin
I get extremely high quality content and no advertisements, tracking or pop-ups. Also, NetNewsWire is blazing fast.
If you're looking for some RSS recommendations:
[1] An extremely good blog for the latest in Covid related pharmaceutical research: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/
[2] Math with bad drawings: https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/
[3] A blog that analyzes military details in fictional battles: https://acoup.blog/
mananaysiempre · 2025-02-16
> existential angst
The best (and most educational) expression of that angst that I know: https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2016/12/28/why-the-number-line-freaks-…
Yawrehto · 2024-09-11
Posts irregularly, but I've found https://mathwithbaddrawings.com to be good.*
There's also https://phys.org, which aggregates content on lots of things, including physics.
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/ looks relevant, but I don't read it that much (not because it's boring but just because I don't find particle physics interesting)
*Tracker warning: https://themarkup.org/blacklight found 92 ad trackers and 274 third-party cookies if you were on a desktop in someplace like Ohio with poor privacy laws.
vyuh · 2021-09-08
I believe the source is https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2015/12/16/good-mathematician-vs-great…
yantrams · 2019-02-08
Here are some relatively lesser known blogs that I can recommend, apart from the usual suspects (worrydream, John Baez etc.)
https://jeremykun.com
http://colah.github.io
https://mathwithbaddrawings.com
https://www.allendowney.com/blog/
And yeah I finally decided to inject some character into my personal website and spent a couple of days wrangling with css and made this --- http://linkdot.link . Not much content really though and it is mostly probability puzzles that I solve every now and then.
Edit: Formatting
chavesn · 2014-04-17
I'm so impressed with the UI and execution. Very well done. No complaints, except that it's perhaps the move timer is a little fast.
I first learned about Ultimate Tic Tac Toe here[1]. Might be worth a link to that post -- it's a great explanation with surprisingly satisfying illustrations.
[1]: http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2013/06/16/ultimate-tic-tac-toe/
VLM · 2013-09-01
http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/
Assuming you're specifically demanding stick figures doing math. It tends towards middle school level math and light comedy. The mystery of "point nine repeating" which was pretty interesting in 7th grade, and a skit along the lines of four technical professions try to split the check at a restaurant.
If someone knows of higher level stick figure math (aside from the linked AES discussion) that would be interesting.
Theoretically there are probably startup ideas around stick figure presentation online (a blogging / image service oriented strictly around sequential stick figures and comics?) or maybe in the infrastructure of something not as formalized and boring as visio but a little more cleaned up than a phone camera shot. Or an online service dedicated to cleaning up phone camera pics WRT hand drawings maybe even with OCR.
rramadass · 2026-07-05
I meant "Formalization" in the larger sense of the word.
The Definition/Theorem/Proof (DTP) emphasis (to the exclusion of everything else) for axiomatization in mathematics arose in the late-19th century and solidified in the 20th century. Prior to this, while mathematicians always practiced rigour, they valued insight/intuition more for understanding.
An attempt was made to teach "Modern Math" in a "New Math" manner which though withdrawn, has left its detrimental mark on mathematics education to this day. See the "Reception" and "Legacy" sections at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math
Excerpts:
Physicist Richard Feynman argued, "first there must be freedom of thought; second, we do not want to teach just words; and third, subjects should not be introduced without explaining the purpose or reason, or without giving any way in which the material could be really used to discover something interesting. I don't think it is worthwhile teaching such material."
In a 1971 article, mathematician René Thom rejected the New Math as "a test of memory that poisons intelligence" because of its complete neglect of intuition.
Mathematician and historian of mathematics Morris Kline observed that it was "practically impossible" to learn new mathematical creations without first understanding the old ones, and that "abstraction is not the first stage, but the last stage, in a mathematical development."
Mathematician and author George F. Simmons wrote in the algebra section of his…
kqr · 2016-01-25
I think this article blows past several important points – perhaps unknowingly.
1. Sure, tic-tac-toe is a fantastic game for someone who needs to learn the "rewards of thinking ahead and taking the opponent’s strategy into account". Game enthusiasts (or indeed anyone above the age of 12) are very unlikely to need this lesson.
1> However, there is an interesting variant of tic-tac-toe[1] so disregarding the game completely isn't fair either.
2. People don't dislike Monopoly because it has dice. Risk has dice, and is incredibly popular. People dislike Monopoly because it is designed to be a game that is not fun to play for all but one player.
2> The game was designed as an anti-capitalist, anti-monopolist lesson.[2] When the rules are set up just right, only one person will be the winner and the other people will spiral into a negative feedback loop and quickly run out of all their money. That's the entire premise of the game: if you have a lot of money you can easily get more. Of course a game which is designed to distress 3/4 people playing in a session is not going to be very highly rated.
That said, I do think there is one popular game that gets very little respect from (at least western) game enthusiasts: go[3]!
Probably known in these circles as "the game computers can't yet beat top humans in" it's an abstract strategy game for two players (like chess) – with incredibly simple rules. You can learn the rules in a few minutes (literally) but it will take you weeks…
eesmith · 2023-12-17
"Why are mathematicians so bad at arithmetic? (2017)" at https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2017/01/11/why-are-mathematicians-so-b… ("It’s a running joke among mathematicians that they’re bad with numbers." and "I’ve heard mathematicians lament that their ability with arithmetic peaked sometime in grade school.") with 124 HN comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30190338
Bear in mind this part:
"Now, are mathematicians actually that bad at arithmetic? Compared to engineers and accountants, perhaps. Compared to the average person on the street, of course not. The “bad at arithmetic” thing is probably overplayed."
jefftk · 2023-06-01
Here's a list I made of how reversing incentives might look for a range of games, including Soccer/Football: https://www.jefftk.com/p/playing-to-lose
This was prompted by a conversation with Ben Orlin, who wrote up his version as https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2014/06/11/playing-to-lose-or-what-muc…
vo2maxer · 2020-03-14
Video by Ben Orlin of Math with Bad Drawings fame:
https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/author/mathwithbaddrawings/
sohkamyung · 2019-04-03
Check out this comic on "Why Not to Trust Statistics" [1]. His book, "Math With Bad Drawings" [2] has a chapter on statistics and why not to trust a single statistical measure only.
[1] https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2016/07/13/why-not-to-trust-statistics…
[2] https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2018/05/23/math-with-bad-drawings-the-…
brudgers · 2015-10-22
I think the process of applying is useful for some people At least for me, it took me outside my comfort zone. I've always just operated under my own name and spokesmodelling "a company" instead for the video created a cognitive shift that I didn't know existed.
This article is probably a reasonable way to look at not getting accepted: http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2015/09/30/why-ive-stopped-doing-interv…
jasonpeacock · 2014-03-18
this reminds me of tic tac toe ten, where the game is a meta game of itself:
http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2013/06/16/ultimate-tic-tac-toe/
paullik · 2013-06-22
I seen this game on: http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2013/06/16/ultimate-tic-tac-toe/
bjz_ · 2017-11-07
The difference is that we know there's something better than Java, C#, or C++ this time around. We have Typescript, Flow, Elm, Purescript, Haskell, Rust, OCaml, Idris, F*, Nim, Crystal, and more. Yes, some lessons have been forgotten that will have to be relearned, but on the whole we are improving. It's like how Andrew Whiles says[0] on how it's important to be forgetful to be a good mathematician:
> It goes like this. You try one strategy on a problem. It fails. You retreat, dispirited. Later, having forgotten your bitter defeat, you try the same strategy again. Perhaps the process repeats. But eventually—again, thanks to your forgetfulness—you commit a slight error, a tiny deviation from the path you’ve tried several times. And suddenly, you succeed.
I think we're a bit better than that, but it pays to remember it the next time you see the young whippersnappers publishing an NPM package doing the same thing you did years ago and deemed to be a failure. By all means, share the war stories with them - it's important we get better at appreciating history, but do it from a position of encouragement. They may yet succeed where you failed. :)
- [0]: https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2017/09/20/the-state-of-being-stuck/