About
Road Sign Math is a road trip game. Find a road sign whose numbers make a true equation, take its picture, and write the math. Driving + Math = Fun.
The first sign
Driving I-94 East toward the Twin Cities, coming home from visiting family in North Dakota, I used to pass a sign that always made me smile: Melrose 3, St. Cloud 33, Minneapolis 99. Three times 33 is 99. I kept wondering how many other signs like it were out there. My friend Jim told me I should make a website, and so that day I did. In 2023 I photographed it again.
Three times around
- 2005–2016
roadsignmath.com
It started on February 13, 2005, as a blog of my signs, and soon other people were sending in theirs. Forty people sent 251 signs, from across the country and beyond, one from the Serengeti. With that many players it grew rules, a scoring system and scoreboards, and in 2011 it became a wiki so players could keep their own signs. I shut it down in 2016, when I let a number of projects go. The first era’s signs are in the archive.
- 2021–2025
A simple blog
A sign Tammy found near Phoenix in March 2021 gave the game a breath of new life as a plain blog, and that summer we found ten more on a road trip through Vermont. In 2023 the blog moved to roadsignmath.xyz: just my family’s signs, no scoring system or leaderboards. Sixteen signs, from Tammy, Tyler and me. More about the blog.
- 2026
The app
No version of Road Sign Math ever reached the dream I had for it in 2005, two years before the iPhone: that you could play it on your phone. The very essence of Road Sign Math is mobile. It’s something you do out in the world. With the help of Claude, that dream is real now. The iPhone app is the whole game: snap a sign, check the numbers it read, write the math, and post it. This website is the window for everyone else, with every sign on a map and no app or sign-in needed. The blog’s sixteen signs were the first ones in it. How it was built.
No points
The first Road Sign Math had rules, scores and scoreboards. This one doesn’t. There are badges, little road signs for your first sign, new states, every season and a few secrets, but no scores and nothing to rank. The fun is in the finding, and anyone can find another way to make a sign work.
Who makes it
I’m Jamie Thingelstad, and I build Road Sign Math with Claude, Anthropic’s AI. The website and the iPhone app are open source. Read Road Sign Math: The Dream Realized! for the story of this one, and join the iPhone beta to play along. Questions are welcome at jamie@thingelstad.com.