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:
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/test-yourself-math-jan-10-2010/
This question is based on a recently-filed lawsuit that aims to recover some of the money lost to Bernie Madoff and associates through his expansive and devastating Ponzi scheme.
This is a cool summary of 2010 in terms of Facebook-related statistics:
http://www.siliconrepublic.com/digital-life/item/19778-facebooks-2010-by-the-numb
With 500 million (!) users, Facebook is rapidly becoming a source of seemingly limitless data about how people live and interact in modern society. Some of the highlights:
The potential applications of analysis of this data, both good and bad, are mind blowing. As previously noted, people have used Facebook data to identify peak break-up times and to predict someone’s sexual orientation based on their various connections and activity.
Pascal’s Triangle is one of the most well-known mathematical constructions in human history. Named after Blaise Pascal, the triangle is rich in patterns and famous number sequences. The first five rows are shown below.
There are many ways to produce Pascal’s Triangle, but the typical way is to define every number as the sum of the two numbers above it: the one above on the right and the one above on the left. If there isn’t a number, then just use zero. For example, 4 = 1 + 3, and 6 = 3 + 3.
The ubiquity of Pascal’s Triangle makes it even more remarkable that a group of three junior high school students have recently collaborated on a paper published in the College Mathematics Journal that uses the famous triangle to find a new number pattern!
Apparently the story begins with one of the students confounding their teacher by insisting that the fifth row of the triangle should be
Despite the teacher’s attempts to “correct” them, the students produced a valid recursive relationship for the new triangle, which they describe as ( East * West + 1 ) / North. They then went on to link their definition to a known sequence in the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences and Voila!, mathematical immortality!
As if the story of three eighth-graders publishing a paper in a college mathematics journal isn’t cool enough, the students collaborated entirely via the internet: one lives in Washington State, one in Alberta, Canada, and one in Indonesia!
A truly inspiring and remarkable story, and an object lesson in encouraging students to pursue their “wrong” answers!
While on vacation, I passed some of my time looking for math on the beach, and I saw a sine wave creeping up the shore.
I thought I might be looking too hard for something mathematical, thereby seeing things that weren’t really there. Thankfully, Geogebra is well-equipped to justify my observations.
Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that Geogebra helps enable my obsessions.
This is a nice infographic from the NYT highlighting some of the data from the 2010 U.S. Census:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/07/us/CENSUS.html
Some of the highlights
The accompanying article from the Times can be found here, and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract of the United States, where this summary information is drawn from, can be found here.