Happy Pi Day, from Vi Hart:
Happy Birthday, Einstein (Part 2)
Today would be Albert Einstein’s 133rd birthday. At MinutePhysics, the celebration continues:
More Einstein Videos
Happy Birthday, Einstein!
March 14th is Pi Day, and it’s also Albert Einstein’s birthday. In honor of Einstein, MinutePhysics is posting a series of videos on his “wonder year” of 1905, when he published several papers that eventually earned him the Nobel Prize.
More Einstein Videos
Raymond Smullyan Excerpts at Dover Publications
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!
Blog Carnival Update
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:
- Use the contact form at Math Is Not a Four-Letter Word.
- Use this mail-to link to email Bon directly.
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!
Purple Comet! Math Meet
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.
- Contest Rules.
- Quick-start instructions.
- See all the past contests. Lots of practice problems!
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.
What I’m Reading: Fermat’s Enigma
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.
Leap Years and the Number 29
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.
Math Teachers at Play #47 via Math Hombre
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.
…
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…
Quotable: Theory vs. Real Life
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
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 