Slope-intercept form is taught in nearly every classroom in the United States, yet there are some countries that never teach it at all.

As of this writing, there are 43 countries in the World Puzzle Federation. Teams of four compete from each country, and there are both individual and team prizes.

Sans punctuation, the title for this article ("Education Of The Future") makes it sound like another "technology you ought to be using" post. There are certainly no shortage of those, including at four blogs at this very site. (1 2 3 4)

The source code below is considered “obfuscated” code, and there is even a contest dedicated to writing such code. However, such code is supposed to be a joke; attempting to read it can be left as a puzzle, but no programmer doing serious work would ever write in such a way.

Last week I discussed getting students involved in the frontiers of mathematical development by involving them in research where they had a chance of solving problems never before solved. However, the lure of the unsolved can be an effective hook even if the students don't work on a problem directly.

For instance, there's nothing like a million dollars to grab a student's attention.

There have been attempts to add some modern work to the curriculum – such as graph theory – but even in those topics the knowledge of the basics goes back many years. Thus mathematics can be perceived as ossified; this can even affect teachers who see no need to update material. Applied work can give some semblance of modernity, but still in the end pure mathematics seems unchanging.