Twenty-one years of Road Sign Math

Road Sign Math started with one sign. Driving home from North Dakota in 2005 I passed a sign on I-94 that read Melrose 3, St Cloud 33, Minneapolis 99, and 3 × 33 = 99. My friend Jim told me I should make a website, “and so that day I did a website.” That was February 13, 2005.

The first site ran for eleven years. It was a blog of signs, then a WordPress site with rules, a scoring system and scoreboards, and in 2011 a wiki so players could keep their own signs. Forty players posted 251 signs from 44 states and eight other countries, one of them in the Serengeti. Jim Bernard and Suzie Meredith made me a poster of the first year’s signs. Back in 2011 I thought about an iPhone app for capturing signs, but I never built it. In 2016, during a round of technical downsizing, I shut the site down and let the domain expire.

That was not the end of it. In March 2021 Tammy found a sign near Phoenix, and Road Sign Math got “a breath of new life” as a blog of just our family’s signs. That summer we found ten more on a road trip through Vermont. In October 2023 I rebooted it again on Micro.blog at roadsignmath.xyz: “Just my signs. No scoring system or leaderboards.” Sixteen signs over five years. Not many, but as I wrote when one turned up in 2025, it always makes me smile.

Then, in October 2026, the third reboot. The iPhone app I had wanted since 2011 finally exists, built with coding agents. You photograph a sign from the passenger seat, the app reads the numbers, you make the math true, and you post it. The sixteen signs from the blog became its first sixteen. roadsignmath.xyz became the map of every sign, the blog retired on October 30, 2026, and the next day the app went to Apple for a public beta.

The point system from the first site did not come back. “The point system wasn’t a good idea. So I want to keep to the root which is a fun road trip game based on math and finding signs.” There are badges instead, little road signs for firsts and places, and no ranks.

Twenty-one years, three sites, one game. I still look at every sign.