Link: Forest Fires This is a cute java applet that illustrates a mathematical phenomenon known as percolation, which has a lot of applications in the real world. If you can actually measure the chance that a fire will jump from one tree to [...]
Perhaps you saw the recent Newsweek article on creativity. It’s worth reading, and while I’ll leave the statistics and arguments in the article (creativity can be measured kind of reasonably; creativity scores in the U.S. are [...]
Link: Feel the numbers Sometimes big numbers are hard to understand. Artist Chris Jordan has developed one of the coolest art displays ever to help comprehend just how big the numbers that we hear in the news are, and what they feel like. [...]
I asked a pair of girls (age 8 and 9) I tutor to ask questions about the chessboard, and got another really great lesson out of it, this one highlighting the importance of making things simple. With a little prompting, we came up with a [...]
Link: A mathematician reads the New Yorker, or, math for votes This week’s New Yorker features an article on voting, and it’s a good read. What does this have to do with mathematics? Well, mathematicians have been thinking about [...]
When: Tuesday, July 13, 1:30pm-3pm Where: The reading room at Elliott Bay Books, 10th and Pine in Capitol Hill. What: An opportunity for kids to explore some of the best stuff in mathematics with a working mathematician. Cost: $25. Please [...]
It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before I felt the need, the yen, the hankering for some mathematical activity again. To that end, I borrowed my girlfriend’s copy of The [...]
The Place: the reading room at Elliott Bay Books. Large but with no natural light, and imperfect lighting. The Time: this afternoon at 1:30. The Crew: 7 kids, in the 2-4th grade [...]
The theme of the book, if we get down to it, is honesty in teaching. No question why it’s aggravating sometimes and inspiring others, why this guy Herndon grates on your nerves with his pompousness and his insistence that he’s got some [...]
There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of [...]
Link: A Sort of Maze When I was a child, I went through a period of maze drawing. There was something deeply compelling to me in the question of how anyone can tell the good direction from the bad. They were a stand in for all kinds of [...]
We spent the next twenty minutes recollecting the argument and writing it down. It was an amazing accomplishment for a second grader.
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