Are You An Optimist?
Is this cone (approximately) half-empty, or (approximately) half-full?
New York Times Learning Network: Symmetry and Soccer Balls
My latest contribution to the New York Times Learning Network’s 15-Minute Lesson Plan series was inspired by Siobhan Roberts’s wonderful article on the geometry of the soccer ball. The Learning Network article is freely available Read more
3 Comments
Sam Kolins · July 7, 2010 at 5:27 pm
Looks half-full to me. Interesting extension though: that looks like more than half though. Seems a lot like an optical illusion or something, doesn’t it? 😛
mrhonner · July 8, 2010 at 9:07 am
A nice little problem would be to find the height required to fill the cone exactly half-way, in terms of the radius of the base and the slant-height of the cone (or, equivalently, the “angle” of the cone).
dhc · July 10, 2010 at 12:34 am
Another extension is not using a right cone (slanted cone instead) with the same height.
As I see it, the cone is half-empty, but apparently that makes me a pessimist.