Two enrichment articles are presented; one dealing with finding partial fractions and reducing to polynomials; the other, with finding the heaviest object from eleven others of equal weight where all twelve are identical in appearance. (JG)

A biography of Martin Gardner is given, elaborating on how he developed his "Mathematical Games" column. (PK)

The well-planned writing workshop is an effective tool for expanding the mathematical discourse of students and helping them become more skillful writers in the discipline. This article reviews a step-by-step process for conducting a workshop and details different reader response strategies. It also offers suggestions for various types of…

A definition is given for curves parallel to a closed curve. Equations for inner and out elliptic parallels are derived and explained. (RS)

The main strand of the NRICH project is the NRICH website (http://nrich.maths.org), which was set up in 1996 to cater for secondary-aged pupils who were attending mathematics master-classes at the Royal Institution. By 1998, problems aimed at primary children were included and the site began to provide for students aged five to 18-plus. At this…

This paper explores the public awareness that there presently exists a crisis in mathematics education and a "dumbing down" of the curriculum, examines the nature of this crisis and argues that there has been a lowering of cultural, pedagogical and cognitive expectations with respect to most learners. The notion of cognitive development in…

On a visit to Russia the author was able to inspect the Moscow papyrus, fragments of an ancient Egyptian mathematical document. (SD)

This brief biography of Riemann is one of a series of biographical sketches in this journal. Riemann was born in Germany in 1826 and studied with Gauss among others. His numerous contributions to mathematics include the invention of a non-euclidean geometry and the founding of topology. (SD)

A three-digit number is chosen, the digits reversed, and the smaller is subtracted from the larger. The difference is a page number in the textbook; the teacher tells the last word on that page. The learning begins when the class uses algebra to prove why the teacher's trick works. (KM)

A fictional biography unfolds the story of Evariste Galois, a staunch French Republican and brilliant mathematician of the nineteenth century. A biographical sketch of the author, Leopold Infeld, is also included. (MN)