A new semester, which many students use as a good time for a new start.
Math tests and new semesters must be changing everywhere, as this recent cartoon from The Wall Street Journal shows.
I had mentioned in class that the great mathematician & magician Persi Diaconis describes our perception of coin-flipping as random, as more a measure of our clumsiness that some attribute of the coin.
Imagine my surprise when I heard an interview with him on one of my favorite radio programs.
Here’s a link to an extended version of the interview. Oh, and in case you’re curious, here’s what he looks like:
Make your own Platonically-solid twelve-sided twenty-ten calendar. Click here for the PDF. Print it on cardstock and follow the instructions.
Or, click here to customize your own edition. (You can even go wild with a rhombic dodecahedron.)
Happy New Year! Make every day count.
One of the earliest jobs for mathematicians was keeping track of the calendar. Anyone who could accurately predict the earliest time to plant and the latest time to harvest, keeping frost from destroying the harvest, was automatically affluent.
There was a great article in the Wall Street Journal this week about calendars. Perhaps you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.
The author (a stand-in for WSJ’s “Numbers Guy”) sends out a short note to subscribing numbers-enthusiasts every week…which is how I got my head’s up on the column.
FWIW, I would favor a calendar with thirteen 28-day months, and one totally “free day” which is not part of any week (two of these, in leap year).
Winter weather means more than sledding and snowmen. Now that it’s snowing, grab a magnifying glass and try snowflake hunting. Bullet rosettes, stellar plates and capped columns are just a few of the varieties of snow crystal you can find in your backyard. Do you think you can site all thirty-five types?
Kenneth Libbrecht, physicist at Caltech and snowflake expert, shared the secrets of the snowflake with Science Friday.
My man Albert once said:
“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.”
So here are some tools for your lifelong quest, in the hope that glimmers of wisdom are yours, early and often.
I saw these last night on the great Open Culture website, where it was the list-topper for their Best of 2009 compilation.
You may recall that Èvariste Galois and I share October 25th as a birthday.
Although my life lacks the drama of his, it was a treat to come across this video this morning. I hope you enjoy it too. Symmetry is reality’s best riddle.
Just in case you hadn’t noticed…I’ve been posting two flashcards every day to the APstats Moodle page. Be patient after you click the link, it should take you to the right spot, eventually.
Taking a few minutes to check these out will help keep your brain cells alive & vigorous!
I wonder whether or not we’d get anything done at school if YouTube were unblocked? The video below has math content only if you’re willing to stretch…a lot.
The ostensible math angle here is that stop-action could be thought about as delta-t, slices of time. Anyhow…enjoy. It looks great in fullscreen high-quality. (And be sure to minimize the ads.)
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