Here’s a nice little math vocabulary quiz from www.sporcle.com entitled “Get an A”.
http://www.sporcle.com/games/puckett86/get_an_A
All the answers are mathematical terms that begin with the letter A, and there’s a nice mix of easy and hard questions.
I did pretty well, but not as well as last time. Apparently I need a student to give a presentation about the conjugate transposes of matrices.
This weekend the NYT profiled Jim Sanborn and his sculpture “Kryptos” which stands outside the headquarters of the CIA in Virginia. In the spirit of CIA activities, the sculpture is itself a giant secret message–one huge cryptotext waiting to be decoded. The irony is that no one has completely cracked it yet!
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/us/21code.htm
Apparently the first three parts have been decrypted, but the last chunk of the cryptotext still remains a mystery, some 20 years after the sculpture was erected. So now Sanborn is handing out hints.
Here’s the cryptotext: the part in yellow is still a secret. Crack the code and become famous!
You may be offered a job by the CIA if you can successfully decode it! At the very least, you’ll be getting some kind of attention from them.
I tried out some organic sugar from Trader Joe’s recently, and since I had some plain old Domino sugar left over, I mixed the two together. The result got me thinking about ways to visualize proportions. Since I’ve been thinking about mixture problems recently, I thought I’d create my own.
Here we have two kinds of sugar–plain old Domino on the left, and Trader Joe’s Organic on the right.
I mixed up some of the white sugar and some of the brown sugar, and got this.
Now, just by looking at the above mixture, can you tell what proportion of the above sugar is white?
An example of tiling the plane with regular hexagons. Well, maybe not the whole plane, but you get the idea.
A valid tiling of the plane means that everything fits together perfectly–no gaps.
A nice simple little exercise is trying to figure out which regular polygons can be used to tile the plane like this. The next step is to allow the use of more than one kind of regular pentagon, and so on.
I am very proud to be a 2010 recipient of the Sloan Award for Excellence in Teaching Science and Mathematics.
The awards are given out by the Fund for the City of New York, and are sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
This award is particularly meaningful as selection is based on testimonials from current and former students, colleagues, and administrators. It is a true honor, and the award ceremony was an uplifting and humbling experience.
As many speakers mentioned–both invited guests and award winners–if more organizations like FCNY and the Sloan Foundation can celebrate teaching, perhaps that will change public discourse on education for the better.
A brief writeup of all the award winners can be found in today’s Cityroom Blog at the New York Times.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/sloan-awards-are-given-to-eight-teachers/