Procrastinating blogger that I am, I missed two out of my three favorite blog carnivals this week. The Carnival of Mathematics XIV went up a full two days early at Vlorbik on Math Ed, featuring several interesting math articles for your browsing pleasure.
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Quotations XIV: The Joy of Mathematics
Someone asked me if I was ever sorry I had chosen mathematics. I said, “I didn’t choose! Mathematics is an addiction with me!”
If we are to teach mathematics at all, real success is not possible unless we know that the subject is beautiful as well as useful. Mere utility of the moment without any feeling of beauty becomes a hopeless bit of drudgery, a condition which leads to stagnation.
…What would mathematics have amounted to without the imagination of its devotees—its giants and their followers? There never was a discovery made without the urge of imagination—of imagination which broke the roadway through the forest in order that cold logic might follow.
Are You Smarter than a 3rd-6th Grader?
Here are a few challenging word problems from Singapore:
I did fine on the 3rd-grade problems, but I stumbled a bit on the 4/5th-grade “How much sugar…” problem. The toy cars were tricky, but manageable. I misread the problem with the chocolate and sweets at first — I think of chocolates as a sub-category of sweets, but in this problem they are totally different. (Perhaps “sweets” are what I would call “hard candy”?) Finally, I had to resort to algebra for the last two Grade 6 questions.
How many can you solve?
Alex’s Puzzling Papyrus
(In the last episode, Dr. Fibonacci Jones discovered a torn scrap of papyrus, covered with hieroglyphic numbers. He promised to teach his daughter, Alexandria, how the ancient Egyptian scribes worked multiplication problems using only the times-two table.)
Back at their tent, Dr. Jones handed the papyrus scrap to Alexandria. “What do you see?” he asked.
“Well, there are two columns of numbers,” Alex said. “Let me write them down.” She got a piece of notebook paper and translated the hieroglyphs. 
Click on the image for a larger view. Translate the numbers for yourself before reading on. If you need help, read Egyptian Math in Hieroglyphs.
Trouble with Percents
Can your students solve this problem?
There are 20% more girls than boys in the senior class.
What percent of the seniors are girls?
This is from a discussion of the semantics of percent problems and why students have trouble with them, going on over at MathNotations. (Follow-up post here.)
Our pre-algebra class just finished a chapter on percents, so I thought Chickenfoot might have a chance at this one. Nope! He leapt without thought to the conclusion that 60% of the class must be girls.
After I explained the significance of the word “than”, he solved the follow-up problem just fine.
Living with History
My daughter has been decorating the kitchen, and she decided to hang these old photos that came with the house. The frames needed repairs, so I took the opportunity to scan the photos. (Click for larger view.)
I wish I knew who the people were, or when the photos were taken. The house shows changes over the years. Eventually, the back porch was closed in to create a pantry and laundry room off the kitchen.
The horse cart picture has a date across one corner. It looks like 9/1908.
This young boy has taught his pony a trick: to step up on a box or something — I can’t quite see what.
Can anyone identify this car? The boy looks sweet with a bouquet for his mother. I wonder if that’s her in the driver’s seat.
Best Kitten Toy Ever
Take one ring from a milk jug, one plastic straw, and two leftover ribbons. Add one 8- to 12-week-old kitten.
Mix together on a hard-surface floor, and enjoy!
The Procrastinating Blogger Award
Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.
Joyful Days kindly nominated me for the Thinking Blogger Award back in the days of the dinosaurs. Well, she isn’t that old, really — it was only last April. I am grateful to her for thinking of me, and ever since then I have been thinking deeply about whom to nominate in my turn. Or, to be more precise, I printed out the nomination post as a reminder, and then it got lost in a pile of “to sort/read/file” papers on a shelf under my desk…
Egyptian Math in Hieroglyphs
Egyptians wrote in hieroglyphs, a type of picture writing, and in hieratics, which were like a cursive form of hieroglyphs.
Hieroglyphs came first. They were carved in the stone walls of temples and tombs, written on monuments, and used to decorate furniture. But they were a nuisance for scribes, who simplified the pictures and slurred some lines together when they wrote in ink on paper-like papyrus. This hieratic writing — like some people’s cursive today — can be hard to read, so we are only using hieroglyphic numbers on this blog.
Download this page from my old newsletter, and try your hand at translating some Egyptian hieroglyphs:
- Hieroglyphic addition and subtraction (pdf 47KB)
Then try writing some hieroglyphic calculations of your own.
Edited to add: The answers to these puzzles (and more) are now posted here.
To Be Continued…
Read all the posts from the September/October 1998 issue of my Mathematical Adventures of Alexandria Jones newsletter.
Mathematics Carnival #13
Here is a word for your vocabulary list: triskaidekaphilia. The 13th Carnival of Mathematics at Polymathematics features facts galore about the number 13, plus several math blog articles for your enjoyment.
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 