[Photo by rdesai.]
The MIT Mathmen got the ball on their own 20-yard line for the last drive of the game. They were down by 2 points, so they needed at least a field goal to win the game.
If quarterback Zeno and his offense advanced the ball halfway to the opposing team’s end zone on each play…
For the rest of NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month), my other blog is featuring a logic game or puzzle every day. So far, I’ve shared three of my online favorites:
And there’s plenty more fun to come. Drop in every day until December to see a new puzzle or game:
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:
[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!
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?
Check out Nick Johnson’s Story of the innertube as a histogram.
Celebrate Math Storytelling Day by making up and sharing math stories. Everyone loves a story, so this is a great way to motivate your children to play around with math. What might a math story involve? Patterns, logic, history, puzzles, relationships, fictional characters, … and yes, even numbers.
What story will you tell?
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Which I am going to say right now. Thank you!
“Math Storytelling Day” copyright © 2010 by Denise Gaskins. Image at the top of the post copyright © Nick Johnson via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
To find the latitude of your position:
To convert your latitude to a distance measurement:
[I will also add these to the original post.]
Tomorrow, September 23, is the equinox — when night and day are equally balanced (or would be, if the sun appeared as a point, rather than a disc). If we lived on the equator, the sun would appear directly overhead at noon and would cast no shadow. Therefore, it’s a great day to perform Eratosthenes’ experiment of measuring the earth:
As I was preparing for Wednesday’s Homeschool Math Club Games & Activities meeting, I remembered my old math calendars and thought, that would be a fun activity to offer. So I pulled up the files and discovered that the days of the week matched perfectly. What a cool coincidence!
So in case you missed the math calendars last year, or in case it’s been long enough that your children have forgotten, here are the “new” versions:
Umm Ahmad created an easier version for young students:
[Photo by Waponi.]
A few years ago, I had several (potentially) future engineers in our homeschool math club, and we enjoyed the challenge of MathCounts and AMC puzzles — but the current crop of local homeschool students is another story.
Last year’s contest-based club meetings dwindled to one student. Even before the recent MathCounts rule changes, I knew I needed a new plan. The final straw was Kitten, whose moaning complaint that she “hates math” has begun to drive me crazy.
So, what’s a homeschool math teacher to do?
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 