Math Blog’s Survey Results

Last week I solicited your feedback via a quick survey. Today I’m sharing the aggregated, non-identifiable information with you. It should give us a better picture of this community.

(Note: I’m copy-pasting charts from Google Forms, but pie charts are clearly a poor choice for visualization in most cases. I might get around to manually redo the images by importing the raw data in a Jupyter notebook.)


Q: What is your Age?

  1. (23.2%) 60-69
  2. (17.9%) 50-59
  3. (16.1%) 40-49
  4. (10.7%) 70+
  5. (8.9%) 35-39
  6. (8.9%) 25-29
  7. (7.1%) 30-34
  8. (5.4%) 18-24
  9. (1.8%) 14-17

Q: Gender?

Gender

Q: Where do you live?

57.1% of respondents are from the USA. About a quarter from Europe. Other regions have a significantly smaller share.

Q: Do you have a university degree?

Degree

Q:What is/was the main topic of your undegraduate studies?

Which degree?

Q: What’s your current job?

The top responses were:

  1. (30.4%) Retired
  2. (26.8%) Related to math, but not a mathematician
  3. (10.7%) No relation to mathematics
  4. (9%) Mathematics teacher or professor

Q: Have you ever published a math related paper in a peer reviewed publication?

Math paper

Q: What’s your primarily favorite area of mathematics?

The pie chart was an abomination, so top 5 below. 🙂

  1. (23.2%) Algebra and Number Theory
  2. (21.4%) Applied Mathematics
  3. (21.4%) Statistics and Probability
  4. (12.5%) Computational Mathematics
  5. (5.4%) Analysis

Q: How satisfied are you with the following aspects of Math Blog’s posts?

Math Blog Satisfaction Ratings

The take home lesson is that we should increase frequency, and a bit variety. (And perhaps introduce some more elementary math content as well.)

Q: What kind of content would you like to see more of?

Top 5:

  1. (64.3%) Book reviews
  2. (64.3%) Overviews of mathematical concepts
  3. (51.8%) Math history
  4. (44.6%) Tutorials
  5. (42.9%) Math news

(The question allowed multiple choices.)

Q: What level of mathematics are you mostly interested in reading about on Math Blog?

Mathematical level

Some of the questions were open and harder to summarize, but I feel this survey provided me with ample feedback. I thank everyone of you who participated in it.

I would also like to thank people who expressed a desire to contribute to the site as authors. I’ll reach out to each of you individually very soon. Thank you.

One Response

  1. mirriam ndunge June 17, 2016

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