I have been enjoying James Tanton’s website. In this video, Tanton explains a foolproof method for creating Egyptian fractions:
See more posts on Egyptian math.
A Couple of Chess Puzzles
Chess is a favorite game for recreational mathematicians — not to play it, but to play around with it. Many puzzles and challenges are based on the moves of chess pieces.
Stretch your brain with these puzzles:
- Can you go on a Knight’s Tour? Start your knight on any square, and try to hop around to all the rest.
- Or, how many queens can you place on the board so that no queen can capture another?
A Harmonic Series Paradox
For my Calculus for Young People students: Beware! We studied a few infinite series that converge to a nice, tame sum — but not all series are so well behaved.
Check out this mind-blowing video from the author of Math Without Words:
[See also: Harmonic Series Quotation and For Niner: A Bit of Calculus Fun.]
2010 Mathematics Game Update
[Photo by pfala.]
Thanks to John Cook’s article about factorials in the recent Mathematics and Multimedia Carnival, we’re adding new rules to the 2010 Mathematics Game.
Let’s play with multifactorials!
Quotations XXV: Math is a Game
Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.
— David Hilbert
quoted by Nicholas Rose, Mathematical Maxims and MinimsIt’s like asking why Beethoven’s Ninth symphony is beautiful. If you don’t see why, someone can’t tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren’t beautiful, nothing is.
Mathematical Juggling
Math Teachers at Play #31 via Homeschool Bytes
Math Teachers at Play #31 offers ten posts about learning and teaching math (appropriate for the 10th month of ’10) at Homeschool Bytes.
Mixing play with learning math is so much more effective for my kids. So, here are some great ideas on how to take the “boring” out of learning math and make it an Adventure . . .
Mathematics and Multimedia Carnival #4 via Wild About Math
Welcome to the 4th edition of the Mathematics and Multimedia Blog Carnival … Four is the smallest composite number, its proper divisors being 1 and 2. Four is also a highly composite number … 4 is the smallest squared prime (p2) and the only even number in this form ….
Reminder: Math Posts Wanted
Now is the time to send in your blog posts for the next Math Teachers at Play blog carnival, coming this Friday to Homeschool Bytes. You don’t have to be a teacher to join in the fun! MTaP covers mathematics from preschool through the first year of calculus, and we welcome any posts about learning, teaching, or just playing around with math.
- Check out last month’s MTaP carnival.
Would you like to host an edition of the MTaP? Read How To Host a Blog Carnival, and then drop me an email or leave a comment on this post.
Lewis Carroll’s Logic Challenges
Symbolic Logic Part I was published in 1896. When Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) died two years later, Part II was lost. Because they couldn’t find the manuscript, many people doubted that he ever wrote Part II. But almost eighty years after his death, portions of Part II were recovered and finally published. The following puzzles are from the combined volume, Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic, edited by William Warren Bartley, III.
These puzzles are called soriteses or polysyllogisms. Carroll began with a series of “if this, then that” statements. He rewrote them to make them more confusing, and then he mixed up the order to create a challenging puzzle.
Given each set of premises, what conclusion can you reach?
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 