Perhaps you’ve heard of the Millenium Problems, the seven $1,000,000 prize math problems. They’re pretty hard. In fact, I kind of assumed we’d see one solved every forty or fifty years. Well, an eccentric Russian named Grigori [...]
You can use math to blow people’s mind so easily and so casually that it almost feels unfair. I had the pleasure of doing so tonight at a volunteer orientation meeting at the Puget Sound Community School, a pretty awesome Seattle school [...]
No tricks. No formulas. You’re just a human being, looking at one of the simplest and most fundamental shapes there is, just like your ancestors once did before anyone had any idea about formulas. What do you do?
Link: Forest Fires This is a cute java applet that illustrates a mathematical phenomenon known as percolation, which has a lot of applications in the real world. If you can actually measure the chance that a fire will jump from one tree to [...]
Perhaps you saw the recent Newsweek article on creativity. It’s worth reading, and while I’ll leave the statistics and arguments in the article (creativity can be measured kind of reasonably; creativity scores in the U.S. are [...]
Link: Feel the numbers Sometimes big numbers are hard to understand. Artist Chris Jordan has developed one of the coolest art displays ever to help comprehend just how big the numbers that we hear in the news are, and what they feel like. [...]
I asked a pair of girls (age 8 and 9) I tutor to ask questions about the chessboard, and got another really great lesson out of it, this one highlighting the importance of making things simple. With a little prompting, we came up with a [...]
Link: A mathematician reads the New Yorker, or, math for votes This week’s New Yorker features an article on voting, and it’s a good read. What does this have to do with mathematics? Well, mathematicians have been thinking about [...]
When: Tuesday, July 13, 1:30pm-3pm Where: The reading room at Elliott Bay Books, 10th and Pine in Capitol Hill. What: An opportunity for kids to explore some of the best stuff in mathematics with a working mathematician. Cost: $25. Please [...]
It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before I felt the need, the yen, the hankering for some mathematical activity again. To that end, I borrowed my girlfriend’s copy of The [...]
The Place: the reading room at Elliott Bay Books. Large but with no natural light, and imperfect lighting. The Time: this afternoon at 1:30. The Crew: 7 kids, in the 2-4th grade [...]
The theme of the book, if we get down to it, is honesty in teaching. No question why it’s aggravating sometimes and inspiring others, why this guy Herndon grates on your nerves with his pompousness and his insistence that he’s got some [...]
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