Math and Social Media

Mathematics as a learning, professional, and personal-interest topic follows the general social [Page 465]media trends in community building. For example, mathematicians, math educators, and math enthusiasts formed dedicated e-mail lists and forums in the 1990s, added blogs in the 2000s, and then created groups and hashtags on larger platforms such as Twitter or Facebook in the 2010s. However, there are aspects unique to math-related social media. For example, math social media often contains symbols, formulas, graphs, and other notations not typically supported by general-use platforms. Therefore, creating and sharing math-related social media items requires specialized tools and solutions. Math-related social media can be computational—that is, it can contain executable code. Mathematics education is a contentious topic, and policy debates called “math wars” spill into social ...