Monthly Archives: December 2013

Chinese bridge inspired by Möbius band

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Bridge_04

[Guest post by Dr. Chase]

Is THIS bridge pictured above in the shape of a Möbius band or merely “associated” with a Möbius band as the article suggests?  If it is a Möbius band, where is the half-twist?  Do you think that the bridge is beautiful?  The architects have proposed that such a bridge be built in China.

Can you imagine a Möbius band being used for a road?  There was “A subway named Möbius,” to quote the title of a light-hearted 1950 short story by A. J. Deutsch.  It was published in the wonderful 1958 book Fantastia Mathematica.

The bridge above is only a concept.  Other one-sided surfaces have inspired architectural designs that have actually been built.  Here’s a house made in the shape of a Klein bottle.

A bit of mathematical humor.  One person comments on the Klein bottle that he likes the house’s orientation.  Well, if it were a true Klein bottle, it wouldn’t be orientable at all!

Microsoft Equation Editor math font hack

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Thanks to a very nice blog commenter, I now know that there is a nice little work-around if you desperately want an equation in a certain font. I’m not sure it’s what I would always want to do, but if you really, really need a particular font, this will work (for a powerpoint or for a poster or some other one-off application).

There’s been a lot of discussion about getting the new Equation Editor to render in different fonts. I love the new equation editor, but I agree that it’s a pain that Microsoft only has one “math font.” (Cambria Math)

Here’s how it works: The following were all produced by creating an equation in the normal way, then selecting the whole equation and changing its format to “Normal Text” (on the Equation Tab). Once you do this, you can go back to the home tab and change the font of the whole equation. Obviously not every symbol will render correctly if that font doesn’t have certain glyphs, but I was surprised how well these rendered.

And here’s sample output (download docx or pdf here):

sample math fonts

A TOK Lecture on Mathematical Thinking

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Students in our International Baccalaureate program here at RM are required to take a core class called Theory of Knowledge (TOK) which is kind of a philosophy class for high school students–or, at least the epistemology piece.

In some schools, this course is taught by math teachers. Here at RM, no math teachers currently teach TOK, which is too bad. So I volunteered to put together a guest lecture on Mathematical Thinking. I’ve tried it out once with a TOK class and I gave the lecture for some of my math teacher colleagues today after school. I plan to give the lecture to more TOK classes this spring.

I thought I’d share it with the MTBoS as well, so here it is. Feel free to read, comment on, or borrow my materials. I think other IB math teachers would especially benefit: