Homepage | Mike Pierce

I’m a math instructor at Colorado Mesa University. During this Spring 2025 term I’m teaching Engineering Calc I and College Algebra and Trigonometry. You may email me at or you may find me in my department office, Wubben 134J, Mon–Thursday 10–11am, or in Escalante 128 at Noon for ½ an hour.

If you’re around Grand Junction, you can find me Wednesday afternoons 3pm–sunset at Gemini Beer Co to chat about books, philosophy, politics, math, education, or whatever. A few things I’ve read and am thinking about now …

Barabbas by Pär Lagerkvist
Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
This is Water by David Foster Wallace
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
The Giver by Lois Lowry vs Anthem by Ayn Rand
Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
An Age of Hyperabundance by Laura Preston
The Aims of Education by Alfred North Whitehead
Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag

Digital Garden

How to Incorporate Mathematical Elements into Your Writing

Advice to help math students improve their writing.

Curated List of Internet Radio Streams

This is my list of Icecast/SHOUTcast/HLS/DASH internet radio stations. These streams can be played with mpd/ncmpcpp or VLC, or just through a web browser.

My Favorite Puzzle Questions

My collection of questions, typically classified as recreational mathematics or logic puzzles, that manage to engage students in a way the usual math curriculum does not.

Problem Solving (Putnam) Seminar

The William Lowell Putnam Mathematics Competition is an annual contest for US and Canadian undergraduate mathematicians. In this seminar we’ll be solving math problems in preparation.

Math Writing & Typography for MS Word

A writing sample and guide to typesetting mathematical writing and using some of the essential features of Microsoft’s WYSIWYG word-processing software.

Programming the Quadratic Formula into a TI-83/84+ Calculator

Once you know the quadratic formula, you can save time by programming it into your calculator once-and-for-all.

My Desmos Showcase

This is a collection of some of the novel demonstrations I’ve created in the Desmos Graphing Calculator for college algebra, calculus, etc. Please feel free to use these or build on them. Let me know if you expand anything here into something strictly cooler.