Do you know about word ladders? It’s where you morph one word to another by changing one letter at a time. Each change needs to result in a legitimate word. Here’s a great word ladder, courtesy of Wolfram Alpha:
math
bath
bash
bast
best
Or, as I think of it, math is best!
(In case you were wondering, bast is strong woody fibers obtained especially from the phloem from various plants.)
If you think you’re up to solving the longest word ladder puzzle ever, here it is, courtesy of Jon McLoone.
Data and Power
Popular Science published a special issue that looks at the transformative effects of the data deluge on our lives and how we got there. Coincidentally, “Mathematics, Statistics, and the Data Deluge” is the theme of the 2012 Mathematics Awareness Month.
The “Data is Power” issue was published in November 2011 and features the following highlights:
“The Santa Cruz Experiment: Can a City’s Crime be Predicted and Prevented?”: A discussion of George Mohler’s development of an algorithm that uses mapping and statistics to track crime.
“This Man Could Rule the World”: The history of the development of network theory from Euler to Erdös to Albert-László Barabási and the impact recent findings have on a wide range of issues including health, technology, and population movement.
“Timeline: The Advance of the Data Civilization”: A photo gallery marking important events in the 22,000-year history of data.
“The Unsplittable Bit”: James Gleick writes about the development of information theory.
The online version of the issue is available here.
Mathematics Awareness Month is held each year in April. Its goal is to increase public understanding of and appreciation for mathematics. Look for announcements related to the 2012 Mathematics Awareness Month here.
(thanks for this one to MAA MathDL, Math in the News)
2 x 2 x 503
here is the game:
Use the digits in the year 2012 to write mathematical expressions for the counting numbers 1 through 100.
- You must use all four digits. You may not use any other numbers.
- You may use +, -, x, ÷, sqrt (square root), ^ (raise to a power), ! (factorial), and parentheses, brackets, or other grouping symbols.
- You may use a decimal point to create numbers such as .2, .01, etc.
- You may create multi-digit numbers such as 10 or 202, but we prefer solutions that avoid them.
Bonus Rules
You may use the overhead-bar (vinculum), dots, or brackets to mark a repeating decimal.
You may use multifactorials.
The Geogebra exploration below demonstrates the triangle sum theorem in the same way that tearing off the corners of a paper triangle and reassembling them to construct a straight angle (180 degrees, pi radians) does.
Move the sliders P and Q to the extreme right. Move the vertices if you like. What do you observe?
Based on your observations, make a conjecture about the sum of the interior angles of any triangle.
Do you think this is sufficient to allow one to say, “I’ve proved it!” ?
I don’t know who Benice Chen is, except some wonderful kind of spirograph ninja magician.
Here’s a benice equation that constructs a sumo wrestler:
Check it all out at the weblog:
Fun math art (pictures) — benice equation
Everything I looked at, the more recent stuff, was built with Geogebra. (See me if you want to get started with it.)
Here’s a short video, underlining the problems humans have being truly random; despite the frequent accusation “you’re so random!”
(It’s really the nit-picky definition of SRS…take a look.)
I just came across this mp3 file containing a podcast from Scientific American (aka Science Talk) that discusses that infamous problem.
The Monty Hall Problem, Discussed
If you have any trouble listening to it, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Ben Goldacre riffs on bad experimental design:
One of the biggest problems presenting mathematics online is getting the notation correct. There are a lot of things that are easy to write with pencil and paper, but hard to get right onscreen. This post is an attempt to test the two contending systems for all of this.
The first has the odd name of LaTeX, and here we go…
The probability of getting \(k\) heads when flipping \(n\) coins is
\[P(E) = {n \choose k} p^k (1-p)^{ n-k} \]
The second is called MathML, or Math Markup Language, lets try it too…
Here’s how we calculate standard deviation:
It appears to work. Tell me if you have any trouble displaying this post or printing it. Don’t worry if your page stutters for a moment before it figures this stuff out. (It’s math, sometimes it takes a little think-time.)
If you can’t wait to discover your AP score, and weren’t willing to pony up $8 to CollegeBoard to find out last week, you can call me and I’ll tell you how you did.
Otherwise, I’m told that results will be mailed out early next week.
Oh, one more thing…you’ll find a larger version of the above class photo in the top section of the APstats Moodle page.
Some people think we picked the wrong irrational constant when we started using pi in so many formulae. They prefer tau, two times pi.
Here’s Vi Hart’s take on the matter:
What do you think?
Please read one of the following two books before you arrive to our first class on Tuesday, August 23.
Both are quite interesting, and either will help you develop a good perspective before our careful study of statistical techniques. The first is more conversational, and the second is more quantitative. Most everyone I know who has read them found the experience enjoyable and enlightening. We will discuss both, and you will write a reflection piece in reaction to the one you’ve read. You must also keep and turn in reading logs with at least thirty entries in double-entry format.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me.
