The sun sometimes turns rectangles into triangles. A nice Sunday morning image.
Appreciation Geometry
Yesterday in Triangle Appreciation
I woke up today quite upset that I had missed Triangle Appreciation Day.
Yesterday’s date, 12/10/10, should have been the perfect occasion to celebrate the 12-10-10 triangle:
Rueful that I had missed the opportunity, I thought to myself “Better late than never”, and started to extol the virtues of this fine isosceles triangle. But after working for a bit and experiencing some deja vu, I realized that I had already done this: on 10/12/10!
So, I guess I was early, rather than late. Happy belated Triangle Appreciation Day!
Challenge Resources
MIT Entrance Exam, ca. 1869
This is the arithmetic portion of the MIT Entrance exam from 1869:
http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/exhibits/exam/arithmetic.html
Since it’s hosted by the MIT libraries website, I assume it’s authentic. I wonder if examinees were allowed to use graphing calculators on this exam?
Be sure to check out the English section also. I hope you know who Count Bismark is!
Appreciation Resources
The Arithmeum
The next time you are in Germany, make sure to get yourself down to Bonn to check out the Calculator Museum. Or, you can just visit their website.
http://www.arithmeum.uni-bonn.de/en/home/
The museum is closed on Montags.
I’m not exactly sure what a Theutometer is, but it seems to be available in their giftshop, and I would gladly accept it as a holiday gift.
Teaching
Paradoxes, Etc
This is an engaging, if verbose, article in the NYT about logical paradoxes.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/paradoxical-truth/
There’s not much new ground covered here, but the author touches on some of the classics–the Liar’s Paradox (Is the statement “This sentence is false” true or false?), Zeno’s Paradox (you’ll never get from point A to point B because first you have to get halfway to B, say C, then halfway between C and B, say D, and so on).
The author notes that writers and philosophers love paradoxes. Students love paradoxes, too. It’s always enjoyable making a student act out Zeno’s paradox by making them get infinitely close to the board, or arguing about whether there are more even numbers or integers. And of course, everyone loves arguing about whether .999999999…. really equals 1 .
Another nice feature of this article is that the Comments section itself demonstrates a paradox: hundreds of people with nothing to say, saying plenty. It reminds me a lot of being in Philosophy class.