Today we celebrate a Permutation Day! I call days like today permutation days because the digits of the day and month can be rearranged to form the year.
Today is also a single-transposition day, since the each string can be formed by simply transposing the 0 and the 2 in the other string.
Celebrate Permutation Day by mixing things up! Try doing things in a different order today. Just remember, for some operations, order definitely matters!
The New York Times Learning Network has put together a great collection of ideas to help teachers of all disciplines bring the Sochi Winter Olympics into the classroom. I contributed to the math section.
For example, using this beautiful infographic showing the medal counts by country for all previous winter olympics, students can explore how countries perform when they host the games.
Use the medal counts to investigate the Olympic “home field advantage.” For each country that has hosted the winter Olympics, calculate the average number of medals it wins when hosting the games and when it does not. Do the host nations tend to win more medals? Do they win more gold medals in particular?
There are many other great ideas for teaching math, science and health here. A separate set of ideas covering history, geography, and social studies can be found here.
I was excited to receive this month’s issue of Math Horizons, published by the Mathematical Association of America, which features my interview with Steven Strogatz!
Professor Strogatz and I had a lively and wide-ranging conversation about mathematics, teaching, writing, and the state of math education. He is an engaging, curious, and open person, and I think all of that comes through in the interview.
Our conversation was so wide-ranging, in fact, that the interview occupies four pages in the magazine, the Aftermath editorial section at the end of the issue, and a few pages at the Math Horizons blog!
It was a personal honor, both to interview Professor Strogatz in an official capacity, and to be published in the MAA’s Math Horizons.
You can read a sample of our conversation here. And get your copy of Math Horizons for the full interview!
The snow, collecting in triangles on the fence like this, reminds me a bit of Sierpinski’s triangle.
At the 2013 TIME 2000 conference, I ran a workshop on mathematical folding called Fun With One Cut! Here are a few of the introductory slides.
In the workshop, students explored some basic properties of plane geometry through folding and tried their hands at the infamous fold-and-cut challenge: given a plane figure drawn on a piece of paper, is it possible to fold the piece of paper in such a way that the figure can be removed from the paper with a single, straight cut?
This is a fun, hands-on mathematical activity, and is connected to some surprisingly deep and rich results in both geometry and mathematical origami.
You can download the set of templates I used for this workshop here, and you can find more of my mathematical folding resources here.