April Come She Will

Why am I embedding an old Paul Simon song into a math blog post?... 'cuz I'll use any excuse I can to play old Simon & Garfunkel tunes, AND because April is officially "Mathematics Awareness Month" --- it has been since 1986, when President Ronald Reagan declared it so. Each year a different theme is chosen, and this year the theme is "Unraveling Complex Systems." More here:

http://www.mathaware.org/mam/2011/announcement/

And a Facebook page devoted to Mathematics Awareness Month (or MAM) is here:

http://tinyurl.com/4q99tmp

Here are the prior dozen years' themes:

2010 - Mathematics and Sports
2009 - Mathematics and Climate
2008 - Math and Voting
2007 - Mathematics and the Brain
2006 - Mathematics and Internet Security
2005 - Mathematics and the Cosmos
2004 - The Mathematics of Networks
2003 - Mathematics and Art
2002 - Mathematics and the Genome
2001 - Mathematics and the Ocean
2000 - Math Spans All Dimensions
1999 - Mathematics and Biology

So put mathematics front-and-center... April come, she will be!