I love quotations. Don’t worry, I’m not going to put them all up here. But from time-to-time, an especially good one might be nice. (Here we go.)
A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is, and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction. Leo Tolstoy
Chalk one up for the Count!
I’m no longer so into pranks, having seen many go tragically awry. So here’s an imaginative April Fools’ Day video from an imaginary teacher, discussing imaginary numbers.
(I found this video thanks to Math4Love.)
How is statistics used to systematically identify possible cheaters?
The Atlantic Journal-Constitution has undertaken a massive data-mining effort which seems to show that the recent cheating scandals in Atlanta and a few other major cities (teachers, not students) may be even more widespread.
Here’s the main article describing their results.
What I found even more interesting was a description of their methods, and a data visualization they created.
nor any drop to drink.
Doing statistics requires access to data, in a usable structured form.
Here are some places to find open data on the web. Enjoy. (And think up some interesting questions that you might answer with this data.)
For what it’s worth (FWIW) I have begun tweeting. Check out @mathlore on Twitter.
For the most part, tweets are pointers that need little or no commenting. When more context or more than 140 characters are called for, the tweets point back here. Is that recursion?
60 Minutes just ran a fascinating story about anti-depressants and the placebo effect. In the report, the interviewed a Harvard researcher who claims that most people with depression would do just as well with a placebo. He also pointed out that while there are some studies showing that the drugs work better than placebos, there are many more unpublished studies that don’t provide convincing evidence that they work better.
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, or 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.)
