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!

Super Bowl XLVI Math Worksheet and Football Comic

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.

NFL Math Quiz

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Fibonacci Numbers and Plants

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.

Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant [1 of 3]

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Math Teachers at Play #46: Living Books for Math

Welcome to the Math Teachers At Play blog carnival — which is not just for math teachers! Here is a smorgasbord of ideas for learning, teaching, and playing around with math from preschool to pre-college. Some articles were submitted by their authors, others were drawn from the immense backlog in my blog reader. If you like to learn new things, you are sure to find something of interest.

Living Books for Math

A child’s intercourse must always be with good books, the best that we can find… We must put into their hands the sources which we must needs use for ourselves, the best books of the best writers.

For the mind is capable of dealing with only one kind of food; it lives, grows and is nourished upon ideas only; mere information is to it as a meal of sawdust to the body.

Charlotte Mason
Toward A Philosophy of Education

Princess Kitten and I took a longer than usual holiday break from homeschooling, but now I’m in plan-for-the-new-semester mode. I hope to include more living math in our schedule, so I decided to illustrate this edition of the MTaP carnival with a few of my favorite living math books. I’d love to hear more living book suggestions in the comments!

If you click on a book cover, the links take you to Amazon.com, where you can read reviews and other details (and where I earn a small affiliate commission if you actually buy the book), but all of these books should be available through your public library or via inter-library loan.

Let the mathematical fun begin…

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