By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, new Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. The inclusion of the Mean Value Theorem in a standard first-year calculus course, especially Advanced Placement Calculus AB, is a curious choice. Students are expected to know the necessary assumptions—the function is continuous on [a,b] and differentiable...

By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org, @profkeithdevlin.bsky.social Best wishes to all for 2025, which happens to be the product of the proper divisors of its square root. Last year saw the announcement that a new “largest known prime number” had been discovered; an integer with 41,024,320 digits. Note to popular science writers: Notice that I just avoided...