RS Road Sign Math

Road Sign Math is a driving game: find a road sign whose numbers make a valid equation, photograph it, and share it. It began with a sign on I-94 East toward the Twin Cities that I passed coming home from visiting family in North Dakota, which listed distances of 3, 33 and 99 miles: 3 times 33 equals 99. On Open Loop #1 I recalled that my friend Jim told me I should make a website, “and so that day I did a website.”

I launched the site on February 13, 2005, as a blog of signs on .Text, moved it to WordPress in August 2007, and as other people sent in their own it gained rules, a scoring system and scoreboards for players and states. Signs came from all 50 states and most continents, including one from the Serengeti; by 2012 there were over 200. In 2011 I rebooted it for the first time, as a wiki, so players could maintain their own signs; an iOS app for capturing signs was considered but never built. In 2016, during a round of technical downsizing, I shut the site down and let roadsignmath.com expire (Road Sign Math Rebooted).

In 2017 I started a Jekyll site for the signs, rsm.thingelstad.com, on a stock theme. Two spin-offs, Road Sign Wordplay and Road Sign Bingo, never got going, and I shut both down in February 2012 with other “ideas that I set up and then never took anywhere.” In March 2021 a sign Tammy found near Phoenix gave Road Sign Math “a breath of new life” at roadsignmath.thingelstad.com (Weekly Thing 177), and that summer we found ten more on a Vermont road trip. I registered roadsignmath.xyz in 2021, and in October 2023 I rebooted Road Sign Math a second time, back to a simple blog: “Just my signs. No scoring system or leaderboards.” New signs still appear, such as one in September 2025.