Maria Chambers

Editor, PracticalBench

Maria Chambers edits the PracticalBench blog. She is a mathematician by training — she studied mathematics at a public state university in the United States — and has spent her career editing and writing for the web, including editing blogs and authoring articles for EmergingTech.com.

What she does at PracticalBench

Maria reads and approves every blog post before it is published. Her part of the job is the one her training suits best: making sure that every number in a post can be reproduced. Each figure quoted in a post has to come from one of the site's calculators or from a dated, named public source, and she checks that the arithmetic, the assumptions and the example inputs actually line up before a post goes live.

She also edits for plain English. The aim of every post is that someone with no maths background can follow the method, change the inputs to match their own situation, and understand what the answer does and doesn't tell them.

How she works

• Reproducible numbers. If a figure can't be regenerated from a calculator or a cited source, it doesn't go in.
• Assumptions stated. Example prices and rates are labelled as examples and dated, with a pointer to where readers can find their own.
• Honest framing. Illustrative stories are labelled as fictional, and estimates are never presented as professional advice.

The full standards she edits to are in our editorial policy.

Contact

To report an error in a post or suggest a topic, emailhello@practicalbench.com and mention the post's address. Corrections are made in the post itself and noted with an updated date.