A colleague’s friend runs a bakery, and to help us celebrate Pi Day, they made little pies for all the math teachers in our department.
They were delicious! But I would have been more impressed if they each had radius 1.
Appreciation Geometry Photography
Math Photo: Beautiful Diagrams
One thing I really love about solving good math problems is making lovely diagrams.
This resulted from a Mandelbrot contest question that asked for the minimum number of lattice-point-centered circles a path could pass through from one point to another.
Appreciation Geometry Teaching
World’s Most Complicated Geometry Diagram
Well, maybe not the most complicated diagram in the world. But this is definitely the most complicated diagram I’ve ever seen a student put on the board in order to solve a problem they created.
Most impressive was that the diagram was entirely relevant to the problem. And as a side note, she was able to solve it!
Appreciation
An Interesting Temperature
The installation of on-board viewscreens has really made flying a lot more fun for everyone. But while most people enjoy watching movies or playing video games, I enjoy analyzing flight data.
As I tracked the numbers for this particular flight, I started to get excited in anticipation of the external temperature hitting -40 degrees. This is a rather special temperature, as it is the unique temperature that is the same in Fahrenheit or Celsius! Some simple algebra tells us so.
Unfortunately, as we started to descend, the temperature was changing more rapidly than the data was updating, so I missed it.
But if we assume temperature is a continuous function, at least we know it had to be -40 out there at some point!
Appreciation
Another Great Math Card Trick
This is another terrific mathematical card trick.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS9AN3XwghA
It requires minimal set-up and no sleight of hand, relying only on a basic mathematical idea that a certain “shuffling”, when repeated three times, preserves the order of the cards.
Perfect for those of us who want to seem magical, but haven’t put the work in on our misdirection skills!
Here’s another card trick based entirely on mathematics.