It’s nice to see the site back up and running. I discovered this right as it went dormant and have been eager to participate.

These signs are found on Cedar Street in Millville, New Jersey just as one pulls into Lakeside Middle School.

Zoom of the bottom part of this sign shows an extensive array of numbers.

The math here is borderline crazy to deal with the huge number of numbers in this sign. Nineteen numbers in all may be a new record!

Ahhh, yeah. Right. Let’s reduce this down and see if it really works.

Whew, that’s a trip through math class!

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This gantry is found over I-405 southbound, just south of downtown Bellevue, WA. Two signs, and the one on the left has just barely visible numbers 2, 5 and 7.

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Road Sign Math has now been migrated into WordPress. This is a huge step to getting the site back up and running. There is still a tremendous amount of work to do, but this gets things positioned right for the future. Note, I have taken care to make sure that people using the old RSS location will get redirected to the new one — your feed readers should see this article as a result.

I’m slapping in plug-ins to get some of the basic functionality we need. Hopefully Geocoding will be able to do with an existing plugin.

Most notably, now that we are in WordPress anyone can sign in and start writing posts. More to come on that later, but this will remove the bottleneck of the RSM administrator having to post everything.

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Hello faithful fans of Road Sign Math! I’m here to give you all an update on the future of our wonderful driving game. Anyone that frequents the website will notice that sign postings have dried up almost completely. This isn’t for lack of signs being found, I have about 50 of them in my incoming mailbox. It is however just a pure lack of time to do the work. It takes 10-15 minutes as it stands to post a single sign on Road Sign Math. You can do the math…

The challenge is actually even worse since when signs are posted that typically encourages people to submit more signs, which is great, but doesn’t provide any pressure relief on the backlog. The principle problem here is a serialized posting process limited by a very busy RSM Administrator!

I had big plans in the past of writing a brand new website for RSM built on Ruby on Rails. The idea was to create something sort of like the Geocaching website that would free RSM from the bonds of my time limitations and allow people to run with the concepts on their own. However, after a few months of trying to do this it became incredibly obvious that this was going to take far too much time. This path wasn’t viable.

However, in the time since then I’ve discovered WordPress. WordPress is principally a blogging package (RSM is currently running on a blogging package called .Text). However, WordPress has incredible flexibility thanks to WordPress Extensions, and it has a tremendous amount of momentum behind it. Extensions are out there that will meet the majority of the needs of Road Sign Math! In fact, in the new version we will have forums, tagging and hopefully even user-generated ratings!

There is only one big gap — obviously there is no extension that will implement the Road Sign Math scoring system. However, I’ve contracted with a consultant to build a WordPress extension that will implement the scoring system in the WordPress administration pages. Once this migration is over all Road Sign Math players will have a login so that you can all go in and post your signs yourself (in fact, if you have signs in the queue I will be sending these back to you to post yourself). In a week or so I will post a URL here so you can try out the new version of the site. There will be no new signs posted here as all my time for Road Sign Math will be spent making the migration to WordPress. It is possible that the new scoring system will lag the relaunch slightly, in which case we may go for a month or so without scores.

I’m very excited about this direction because I know it can get done. Stay tuned for more updates… and as always…

Remember,

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Todd Southworth brings this huge sign assemblage from Pomona, California.

Mr. Southworth freely admits that he shot this photo and figured the math out later. This solution wasn’t an epiphany while going down the road at 70 miles an hour. He noticed the 71 + 10 first, realizing that was 81 which is easily 9 via a square root. The rest came together nicely! Hats off for the use of the factorial! !   !     !

This sign is on on eastbound I-10 at the Kellog Interchange where I-10, CA 57 and CA 71 meet in Pomona, California. See sign on map!

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Samer Adra storms onto the scene with his first sign from California.

The math works out nicely via this solution.

Samer had originally submitted this sign as a sequence sign, however, we couldn’t justify it. The sequence would have been….

This sign is on on I-80 heading west from Reno to Sacramento. See sign on map!

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Geoff Hazel sends this very grainy, barely legible, but certified photo of a nice simple sign assemblage in Bellevue, Washington.

Umpty dump…

This sign is at exit 17 on I-90 in Bellevue, Washington. See sign on map!

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Steven Francis recently discovered Road Sign Math and has been searching for valid signs since, and found this one to send in for his first winner. Mr. Francis is a math teacher, so buckle your seat belts fans, it’s going to get a little crazy.

Mr. Francis submits this formula as the winner for the sign. It’s well done, exercising a rare use of exponents.

Mr. Francis also identified these formulas as straightforward ways to make the sign work.

Now Mr. Francis decided to fire up the engines and have some fun. This formula doesn’t seem to violate any rules, but even Mr. Francis was worried that it didn’t match with the spirit of the game.

Reasoning this out…

Whew! Extra points if you are actually able to follow that!

This sign is found at the end of a service road that meets Passons Boulevard in Pico Rivera, California between the Sheriff’s station and El Rancho high school where Mr. Francis works. See sign on map!

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Mark Peal sends this sign from ski country in Vermont. The words are clear enough, but additionally the arrows let you know that everything is uphill from here.

Mr. Peal brings it all together in a straightforward manner.

This sign is in the Irasville neighborhood of Waitsfield, Vermont, southbound on VT-100 approaching VT-17. See sign on map!

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H.B. Elkins ticks off another state in the chase to put all 50 states on the map. This one is a squeker, almost in Arkansas but landing on the Missouri side.

Some quick math from the bottom up with a square root gets this one in the door.

\sqrt{25 - 9} = 4

This sign is at on US-71 southbound near the Arkansas border, just outside of Pineville, Missouri. See sign on map!

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