Sitting at home with a cold, tired of watching TV and playing video games, stumbled upon…
Happy Pi Day II
[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
Time to Celebrate
Are your students doing anything special for 
If you need ideas, here are some great
500 (?) and Counting
Photo by rileyroxx.
Could this be my 500th post? That doesn’t seem possible, even counting all those half-finished-and-then-deleted drafts. Well, at least it is my 500th something, according to the WordPress.com dashboard. And surely a 500th anything is worth a small celebration, right?
Maybe my students aren’t so bad, after all…
It has been awhile since I posted a link to Rudbeckia Hirta’s Learning Curves blog. Here are a few of her students’ recent bloopers:
Quotations XIX: How Do We Learn Math?
He doesn’t learn algebra
in the algebra course;
he learns it in calculus.
I have been catching up on my Bloglines reading [procrastinating blogger at work — I should be going over the MathCounts lesson for Friday’s homeschool co-op class], and found the following quotation at Mathematics under the Microscope [old blog posts are no longer archived].
That’s Mathematics
Things are still hectic, but at least the phone company guy found the problem and got our “extended DSL” service working. “Extended DSL” is what you get when you live out in the boonies. No guarantees that it will be faster than the ancient modem, but at least it doesn’t tie up the phone line anymore.
And it is a bit faster, so I finally get to enjoy You Tube. If the video doesn’t display properly, you can find it at this link:
Rewriting the History of Math
Here are a couple of quick links to math in the news:
- MathTrek: A Prayer for Archimedes
It turns out Archimedes was even closer to discovering calculus than we had thought.
- Tales of the golem: With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse
While Pythagoras, on the other hand, sees his place in math history threatened by an experimental disproof of the Pythagorean Theorem. [Hat tip: jd2718.]
A Very Short History of Mathematics
This paper was read to the Adams Society (St. John’s College Mathematical Society) at their 25th anniversary dinner, Michaelmas Term, 1948. [Warning: Do not attempt to read this while drinking coffee or other spittable beverage!]
Hat tip: I found this through the math carnival at a mispelt bog.
Update: The original page has disappeared from the internet, or at least I cannot find it any more, but the Internet Archive Wayback Machine came to the rescue. After my plea for help, James Clare pointed me to the article’s new home.
Quotations XIII: Mathematics Education Is Much More Complicated than You Expected
Registrations have been rolling in for our homeschool co-op, and the most popular classes are full already. Math doesn’t seem to be a “most popular” class. I can’t imagine why! Still, many of my students from last year are coming back for another go, and I am getting spill-over from the science class waiting list.
Anyway, I have started planning in earnest for our fall session. As usual, I look to those wiser than myself for inspiration…
Many teachers are concerned about the amount of material they must cover in a course. One cynic suggested a formula: since, he said, students on the average remember only about 40% of what you tell them, the thing to do is to cram into each course 250% of what you hope will stick.
Continue reading Quotations XIII: Mathematics Education Is Much More Complicated than You Expected
Math Jokes
Blame it on MathNotations and his Corny Math Jokes (which actually included one I hadn’t heard before) — or maybe I have been reading too many of Chickenfoot’s strange tales — but anyway, I’m in a mood for humor.
So here are a couple of old favorites:
- The Frivolous Theorem of Arithmetic
Almost all natural numbers are very, very, very large.- The First Strong Law of Small Numbers
There are not enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them.
Hat tip: These had gotten lost in the dustbunnies of my memory until I saw the Frivolous Theorem mentioned recently at Art of Problem Solving.
Edited to add: Scott at Grey Matters recently updated his Mathematical Humor post, which may be where I had originally read these. He links to several more great MathWorld jokes, including the ever-tasty Pizza Theorem.
Spring Cleaning My Blog Links
Our whole family is coming down with something again. What a nuisance!
Since I don’t feel up to real cleaning, I guess it’s time to spruce up my sidebar. If you haven’t posted since November or December of last year, you’re outta there. And for those of you who use Blogger — well, I’m sorry, but if I get a persistent “Blogger: 404 – Page Not Found” then you’re gone, too. If you are still actively blogging, please send me an email.
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 