Photo by RBerteig. Take a break from “serious” math and have a little fun today with some classics of recreational mathematics. Do you have a favorite math or logic fallacy? Please share it in the Comments below. Continue reading April Fool’s Day: Fun with Math Fallacies
Remember the Math Adventurer’s Rule: Figure it out for yourself! Whenever I give a problem in an Alexandria Jones story, I will try to post the answer soon afterward. But don’t peek! If I tell you the answer, you miss out on the fun of solving the puzzle. So if you haven’t worked these problems yet, go back to the original posts. Figure them out for yourself — and then check the answers just to prove that you got them right.
Leonhard Jones is Alexandria Jones’s younger brother. He enjoys woodworking, and he cut a wooden cube into 8 smaller blocks to make himself a puzzle.
Leon painted the 8 blocks with his two favorite colors: red and forest green. When he was finished, Leon could put the blocks together into a red cube, or he could switch them around to make a green cube.
How did Leon paint his blocks?
[Feature photo above by pauladamsmith.]
Now there is an ancient Greek letter,
And I think no other is better.
It isn’t too tall,
It might look very small,
But its digits, they go on forever.— Scott
Mrs. Mitchell’s Virtual School
Are your students doing anything special for 
If you need ideas, here are some great
Most of our math contest preparation consists of working lots and lots of old test problems. Occasionally, however, I put together a tip sheet summarizing a topic that my students have trouble remembering.
Alexandria Jones hated using store-bought wrapping paper at Christmas. She tried to wrap each present as a hand-crafted work of art.
Last year, she did mini-scenes with plastic figures building cotton snowmen or skating on aluminum-foil ponds — and, for her brother Leonhard’s gift, her favorite creation: toy dinosaurs having a snowball fight. But those 3-D scenes got knocked about under the Christmas tree.
This year, she decided, she would wrap the packages flat. But then, how could she make them special?
Here are a couple of quick links to math in the news:
Classes are back in session at our homeschool co-op, so I am again collecting short quotes for the blackboard. Here are the ones I used in September:
Any fool can know. The point is to understand.
Life without geometry is pointless.
You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
Would you like to study “the knowledge of all existing things and all obscure secrets”? That is how Scribe Ahmose (also translated Ahmes) described his mathematical papyrus. Ahmose’s masterpiece is now called the Rhind Papyrus, after Alexander Henry Rhind, a Scotsman who was one of the first archaeologists to make meticulous records of his excavations (rather than simply hunting for treasures). Rhind purchased the papyrus from an antiquities dealer in Luxor, Egypt, in 1858.
Ahmose’s writing included a huge table of fractions as well as story problems, geometry, algebra, and accounting. Can you solve any of Scribe Ahmose’s problems?
No peeking! This post is for those of you who have given the trisection proof a good workout on your own. If you have a question about the proof or a solution you would like to share, please post a comment here.
But if you haven’t yet worked at the puzzle, go back and give it a try. When someone just tells you the answer, you miss out on the fun. Figure it out for yourself — and then check the answer just to prove that you got it right.
Continue reading Hints and Solutions: Patty Paper Trisection
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 