Below is a list of 33 short thought-provoking articles on mathematics. Clicking on an article will open a downloadable PDF in a new window. Many of the articles are written by university professors and instructors, and are suitable for students studying IB mathematics (although some are more suitable for HL students than SL). This (growing) collection of articles is meant to be a resource for students as they prepare to select a topic for their Exploration (IA). The primary purpose of sharing these articles is not that students should choose a topic explored in one of them (although that may occur), but to provide a wide range of well-written papers on interesting mathematics appropriate for an SL and/or HL maths student. These papers are not meant to be examples of what a student Exploration would look like but to illustrate effective and engaging mathematical writing - that not only includes wrting about mathematics but also doing mathematics in a way that clearly demonstrates thorough understanding of the mathematics.

A Budget of Boxes (Friedlander & Wilker)

A Classroom Investigation into the Catenary (Staples)

A Dozen Minima for a Parabola (Hall)

A Generalization of a Minimum Area Problem (Gordon)

A New Wrinkle on an Old Folding Problem (Frederickson)

Chasing Imaginary Triangles (VanderBurgh & D’Alessio)

Do Dogs Know Calculus? (Pennings)

Do Dogs Know Related Rates Rather than Optimization? (Perruchet & Gallego)

Further Optimisation Problems (Glaister)

Gabriel’s Wedding Cake (Fleron)

Gasket of Circles: A Fractal of Circular Nature (Haggar & Krcic)

Getting a Better Angle (Choate)

Hidden Circles and the Digits of Pi (Illner)

How Do You Slice the Bread? (Hill, Nord, Malm & Nord)

Intro to the Math of Knots & Links (Koytcheff)

Linear Diophantine Equations (Angell)

Mathematical Models & Infectious Disease Dynamics [3 articles]

Mathematical Rugby (Polster & Ross)

Mathematics & Disease Eradication (Smith)

Maximising a Polygonal Box (King)

Optimal Ball Placement in Rugby Conversions (Freitas)

Pathways and Barriers to Counting (Brown)

Place Kicking Locus in Rugby (de Villiers)

Power of Symmetry: Linking Algebra & Geometry (Gusita & Silbert)

Rugby and Mathematics (Jones & Jackson)

Shark Attacks & Poisson Approximation (Schmuland)

Squaring, Cubing & Cube Rooting (Benjamin)

The Best Shape for a Tin Can (Roe)

The Bingo Paradox (Benjamin, Kisenwether & Weiss)

The Birthday Problem Revisited (Pulver)

The Folding Box Problem (Lord)

Thinking Out of the Box Problem (Dodge & Viktora)

To Build a Better Box (Dundas)