My students were recently making fun of some of the math problems on the PSAT. Apparently, one of the questions went something like this:
After having a bit of a laugh about it, we decided to try to help the PSAT exam writers make a more interesting question. Here is our revision:
Creating this new question was far more interesting than solving the original! And thanks to Wolfram|Alpha, we can easily check the answer.
This is a crazy collection and categorization of mathematical oddities.
http://www.recmath.org/PolyCur/p6odd/index.html
Here, the word oddity has a specific, technical mathematical meaning: an oddity is a figure with at least one line of symmetry that is made up of an odd number of copies of some polygon.
I’ve never heard of oddities before, and I learned a lot of new vocabulary words while exploring this page: polyform, hexapent, and quinquerotary, to name a few!
Through Math for America, I am part of an on-going collaboration with the New York Times Learning Network. My latest contribution, a Test Yourself quiz-question, can be found here:
https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/test-yourself-math-oct-24-2011/
This problem is based on a recent discovery of sunken treasure at the bottom of the sea and asks “How much is silver worth per pound?”
This is an amazing resource: a collection of science demonstrations from Harvard Natural Sciences Lecture Demonstration Services.
https://sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu/catalog
There are hundreds of demonstrations in the archive. Each entry includes an in-depth description of the scientific principle(s) on display in the demonstration, as well as detailed instructions on how to execute the demo.
Topics include Newtonian Mechanics, Light and Optics, and Thermal Physics. There is also a collection of mathematical demonstrations, as well as a small set of videos.
And be sure to check out their Facebook page here: http://www.facebook.com/NatSciDemos
