Are you wondering where MTAP #18 went? Here's the story (contest-winning entry from Lisa Downing), and we're sticking to it!The Odds were at odds with the Evens. It never seemed fair to them that two Odds made an Even but two Evens didn't make an Odd. Fifteen fired the first salvo by stepping into the order twice. Sixteen managed to jump in, but then Eighteen disappeared. Seventeen and Nineteen were prime suspects. The Numerologist stepped in and told everyone to get back in the right order or ELSE. Unfortunately Eighteen was still missing. The authorities launched an investigation but there were so many factors involved that they never could get to the root of the problem.
Riddle: What do 10011, 23, and 13 have in common?
Gorgeous! The photo above, of an anglerfish ovary magnified 4 times, was taken by James E. Hayden, and won 4th place in the Nikon Small World photomicrography competition. You can see lots more winning photos here. More about Hayden at the end.
Getting down to business, allow me to welcome you to a math buffet. I think there will be something here to tickle everyone's palate. (Photo by skenmy.)
- Maria Andersen is at it again! She's redesigned her math for elementary teachers course, and shows us some of the results in Transforming Math for Elementary Ed. This post is full of links to work her students did, some of it exciting stuff.
- John Golden offers us a game called Area Block modeled on Blokus (one of my current favorites to play with kids). I haven't had a chance to play it yet, but I am definitely looking forward to it. (Here's a bit of math teachers at play trivia. John and Maria work within 30 miles of each other in my home state. What state is it?)
- Denise walks us through an algebra word problem, translating from English to "mathish". Nice! And Jason wants our help with teaching students how to read a few different types of problems, in "When vocabulary isn't the issue" and "A reading experiment". The puzzle given in that second post looks fun!
- Pat Ballew gets us thinking about geometry with his "Notes on Cyclic Quadrilaterals".
- Do we discover math or invent it? How we answer that question affects how we talk about the math of the ancients. Dan MacKinnon reviews a book and discusses this intriguing issue.
- A short review of The Little Book of Mathematical Principles is at We Overstep.
- Pumpkin Patch offers us another game, Sum Math.
- The descriptions don't always look accurate to me, but you may find some goodies among the "100 Incredible Open Lectures for Math Geeks". Some are audio only, some are videos.
If you haven't stuffed yourself yet, here are a few more tidbits I noticed over the past two weeks.
- Two mysteries solved, one a murder, and one the opening chord of Hard Day's Night.
- Sometimes there's a hard way to solve a problem, and an easy way...
- Does a bullet that's fired from a gun land at the same time it would if it were dropped? Built on Facts gives us some equations and Myths Busters weighs in on YouTube.
- On thinking before you compute.
- Like comics? Indexed on confusion as a function of information, and a graphic novel about Bertrand Russell.
Here's the interview Nikon did with James E. Hayden. I wrote and asked him how he uses math in his work. He said:
As for the math - it is, of course a large part of doing any kind of research. In a lot of my regular work, we work with analysis programs that quantify different aspects of the images we capture. Everything from simple counts (how many cells in the field of view?) to time lapse analysis - how fast are the cells moving? In what direction? At what angle to the original movement? Does the rate of movement change over time? Do we need to quantify the interaction of the cells in some way? Is there a change in the fluorescence intensity values? And other interesting things like that. My assistant, Fred Keeney (who won an Image of Distinction in this year's competition) has been taking computer programing classes to help us automate these kind of analyses.Submit your blog article to the next edition of math teachers at play using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page. (Our schedule is changing to once a month. Denise at Let's Play Math! will host the next carnival on November 20.)
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