To celebrate their re-release of his classic puzzle books, the Dover Math and Science Newsletter featured an interview with Raymond Smullyan, as well as several extended excerpts from his books. (For my math club students: Professor Smullyan invented the Knights and Knaves puzzles.) Enjoy!
It seems like a corrolary to Murphy’s Law: Whenever I claim that the blog carnival site is working, it immediately goes on the blink. At any rate, I can’t get the site to load at all today. If you want to send in a post for the next math carnival, you can:
Everyone is welcome — if you’ve written a blog post about learning, teaching, or just playing around with math, from preschool to calculus, please send us your link!
The 2012 Purple Comet! Math Meet is a free, on-line, team competition for middle and high school students around the world. Every team needs an adult supervisor. Homeschoolers are welcome and should register under the Mixed Team category.
Register now. The contest will run Tuesday, April 17, through Thursday, April 26, 2012. That gives your team plenty of time for practice sessions between now and then.
Homeschooling is much more than just doing school at home — it’s a lifelong lifestyle of learning. And thanks to the modern miracle of inter-library loan, even those of us who live in the middle of nowhere can get just about any book sent directly to our tiny home-town libraries.
As I mentioned in Math Teachers at Play 46, I’m trying to add more living books about math to our homeschool schedule, including my own self-education reading. So, a copy of Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem finally showed up at my library, and I am thoroughly enjoying it.
Astronomer Dr Meghan Gray explains how messed up our calendar is. The mis-match between the length of a day and the time it takes the earth to travel around the sun makes a leap year necessary. From Numberphile.
Welcome to the 47th edition of the Math Teachers at Play Blog Carnival!
http://bit.ly/MTAP47The Number Dictionary reveals two particularly interesting facts about 47.
- 47 is a prime and a Gaussian prime.
- 47 is the difference between two squares.
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I don’t think I’ve appreciated 47 nearly enough before this carnival. But we should move on since there are a lot of neat entries this month…
I had the most beautiful set of theories you ever knew when I started out as a schoolma’am, but every one of them has failed me at some pinch or another.
— Anne Shirley (fictional)
Anne of Avonlea by Lucy Maude Montgomery
Sue VanHattum is trying to convince the publishers that this excellent book would reach a wider audience if they made it available at a lower price. What do you think?
As anyone who has taught or raised young children knows, mathematical education for little kids is a real mystery. What are they capable of? What should they learn first? How hard should they work? Should they even “work” at all? Should we push them, or just let them be?
There are no correct answers to these questions, and Zvonkin deals with them in classic math-circle style: He doesn’t ask and then answer a question, but shows us a problem — be it mathematical or pedagogical — and describes to us what happened. His book is a narrative about what he did, what he tried, what worked, what failed, but most important, what the kids experienced.
This book is not a guidebook. It does not purport to show you how to create precocious high achievers. It is just one person’s story about things he tried with a half-dozen young children. On the other hand, if you are interested in running a math circle, or homeschooling children, you will find this book to be an invaluable, inspiring resource. It’s not a “how to” manual as much as a “this happened” journal. … Just about every page contains a really clever teaching idea, a cool math problem, and an inspiring and funny story.
— Paul Zeitz
Introduction to Math from Three to Seven
Lance Friedman of MathPlane.com has posted two bits of fun in honor of Super Bowl XLVI. (Click the images to go to Lance’s site.) And if you’re a homeschooler, Currclick is offering a Super Bowl Mini-Helper free this week.
Continue reading Super Bowl XLVI Math Worksheet and Football Comic
Have you ever wondered why so many plants grow in Fibonacci Numbers? Vi Hart offers a great explanation (with hands-on activities) in these three videos — and she introduces a new species called the slugcat, which my daughter thinks is adorable.
