There is now a community for the Motivate The Math podcast. Use a web app like satellite.earth or nostrudel.ninja to access it and participate. View quoted note →

Homeschoolers. How can I help teach you and your children math? I know you want to learn and I want to teach it - but how do we really come together? I need to understand your pain and struggles. Please share with me here.

Did you know that the points on an elliptic curve form an Abelian group? Now I’m glad we suffered through 2 podcasts to explain what groups are and how we don’t know why but it’s important to know something is a group! We (on this podcast) still don’t know why this fact matters for elliptic curves yet - but it seems plausible in the context of what we discussed that we like: 1) closure under point addition (adding any two points gives us a point that is definitely on the curve) 2) infinity point is the identity (always wondered what that point meant in the coding books like @jimmysong Programming Bitcoin) 3) order of addition doesn’t matter (P1+P2) = (P2+P1) So the points being an abelian group makes all of the arithmetic around adding points nice. VERY NICE!