LOVE this!
Thanks, Vi, for providing us with more out-of-the-box mathematics–we’ve come to expect it!
Snakes
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Category Archives: Math on the web
Dear math
from relentlesslyoptimistic.com
from relentlesslyoptimistic.com
[Hat tip: Tim Chase]
Keeping it real
[Hat tip: Tim Chase]
Relation-ship
from somuchpun.com
I love this :-). Very appropriate, too, since I’ve been thinking about order & equivalence relations in my analysis class recently.
[Hat tip: Tim Chase]
Helping students who are stuck
How do you help a student who is stuck on a problem? A student who can’t seem to find the mistakes s/he makes? I really like this recent idea from Maria Droujkova, shared by Denise of Lets Play Math. Original source here.
When a kid is feel bad about being stuck with a problem, or just very anxious, I sometimes ask to make as many mistakes as he can, and as outrageous as he can. Laughter happens (which is valuable by itself, and not only for the mood – deep breathing brings oxygen to the brain). Then the kid starts making mistakes. In the process, features of the problem become much clearer, and in many cases a way to a solution presents itself.
Maria Droujkova
Geodesic Chicken Coup
from hackaday.com
This is awesome. Thanks to hackaday.com for the lead on this. Here’s the original post.
Physics of Angry Birds
A nice projectile motion application, suitable for almost any level of high school math.
Here’s an excerpt of the Wired.com article by Rhett Allain:
You know the game, I know you know. Angry Birds. I have an attraction to games like this. You can play for just a little bit at a time (like that) and each time you shoot, you could get a slightly different result. Oh, you don’t know Angry Birds? Well, the basic idea is that you launch these birds (which are apparently angry) with a sling shot. The goal is to knock over some pigs. Seriously, that is the game.
But what about the physics? Do the birds have a constant vertical acceleration? Do they have constant horizontal velocity? Let’s find out, shall we? Oh, why would I do this? Why can’t I just play the dumb game and move on. That is not how I roll. I will analyze this, and you can’t stop me.
[Hat tip: Tony Sanders]
Predicting Partitions
This recent news from the American Institute of Mathematics:
January 20, 2011. Researchers from Emory, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Yale, and Germany’s Technical University of Darmstadt discovered that partition numbers behave like fractals, possessing an infinitely-repeating structure.
In a collaborative effort sponsored by the American Institute of Mathematics and the National Science Foundation, a team of mathematicians led by Ken Ono developed new techniques to explore the nature of the partition numbers. “We prove that partition numbers are ‘fractal’ for every prime. Our ‘zooming’ procedure resolves several open conjectures,” says Ono.
Accompanying this result was another achievement developing an explicit finite formula for the partition function. Previous expressions involved an infinite sum, where each term could only be expressed as an infinite non-repeating decimal number.
Counting the number of ways that a number can be ‘partitioned’ has captured the imagination of mathematicians for centuries. Euler, in the 1700s, was the first to make tangible progress in understanding the partition function by writing down the generating series for the function. These new results involve techniques which could have applications to other problems in number theory.
Wired.com also just reported on it, and you can find their coverage here.
MathOverflow
I’m sure most of the mathematical community already knows all about mathoverflow.net, but just in case, thought I’d post a link here. It was news to me…perhaps just because I’m not really in the collegiate academic math community. (Though the wikipedia article says it was created in 2009, so it’s still in its infancy.) But it’s definitely a resource I’ll be using as I do my own mathematical investigations and my grad coursework. I’ve enjoyed the original stackoverflow.com for looking up answers to questions, and in two instances so far, asking my own. StackOverflow and sites like them fill a vital role in the online community–quick, thorough answers to pointed questions.
Random Walks 