Today we celebrate the second Permutation Day of the year! I call days like today permutation days because the digits of the day and the month can be rearranged to form the year.
We can also consider today a Transposition Day, as we need only a single transposition (an exchange of two numbers) to turn the year into the day and date.
Celebrate Permutation Day by mixing things up! Try doing things in a different order today. Just remember, for some operations, order definitely matters!
ESPN recently published a list of “expert” predictions for Superbowl 50. Seventy writers, analysts, and pundits predicted the final score of the upcoming game between the Carolina Panthers and the Denver Broncos. I thought it might be fun to crowdsource a single prediction from this group of experts.
Below is a histogram showing the predicted difference between Carolina’s score and Denver’s score. The distribution looks fairly normal (symmetric and unimodal).
The average difference is 6.15 points, with a standard deviation of 7.1 points. Since we are looking at Carolina’s score – Denver’s score, these predictors clearly favor Carolina to win, by nearly a touchdown.
This second histogram shows the predicted total points scored in the game. The average is 44 points, with a standard deviation of 5.7 points.
Combining the two statistics, let’s say that the group of ESPN experts predict a final score of Carolina 25 – Denver 19. We’ll find out just how good their predictions are tomorrow!
[See the full list of ESPN expert predictions here.]
Today we celebrate the first Permutation Day of the year! I call days like today permutation days because the digits of the day and the month can be rearranged to form the year.
Celebrate Permutation Day by mixing things up! Try doing things in a different order today. Just remember, for some operations, order definitely matters!
Thanks to the strong presence of mathematicians and math teachers on social media, I know I’m not the only person who, when sitting around with a box full of compasses, unexpectedly ends up doing things like this.
A circle made of circle-makers! Or, from another perspective, a regular 26-sided polygon.
The fact that I created an object that doesn’t even appear to have a name made me feel a little better about this use of time.
I’m excited to be presenting at the upcoming Teaching Contemporary Mathematics (TCM) conference at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM).
NCSSM is an internationally known leader in providing advanced math, science, and engineering education to public school students. They have a residential program that serves 11th and 12th graders and distance programs that serve students all across the state of North Carolina.
NCSSM hosts the annual TCM conference to bring together teachers to talk about innovations in teaching modeling, technology, and problem-solving in advanced high school courses. My talk, Mathematical Simulation in Scratch, details some of the work I and my students have done in our mathematical computing course.
TCM runs January 29-30 on the campus of NCSSM in Durham, North Carolina. You can find out more information about the TCM conference and see the schedule of talks here.