Math Photo: Snowy Histogram

Snowy Histogram

The way the snow collected on the fence reminded me of a histogram, though you might have to rotate your head 225 degrees to see it for yourself!  As I took this in, I wondered why some chains of snow were longer than others.  I also wondered what this representation of data said about the direction of snowfall.

Related Posts

 

Math Quiz — NYT Learning Network

oil pipelineThrough Math for America, I am part of an ongoing collaboration with the New York Times Learning Network. My latest contribution, a Test Yourself quiz-question, can be found here

Test Yourself — Math, February 12, 2014

This problem is about the proposed Keystone oil pipeline, which would transport around 830,000 barrels of oil every day from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.  What is the approximate yearly value of the oil transported by the pipeline?

02/14/2014 — Happy Permutation Day!

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.

02142014

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!

Teaching Math Using the Olympics

sochi olympicsThe 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.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox

Join other followers: