Great comments in the last post! In the spirit of self referential comedy, I have to include one of the suggestions mentioned there: If you go to the original comic, you get an [...]
The satisfaction and excitement are so palpable.
If you want to see someone really committed to freedom in education, check out Free At Last: The Sudbury Valley School, which you can read online at the link, if you want. I went there for the first chapter, on teaching arithmetic, but [...]
It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that [...]
Link: Nice to see a well balanced prodigy.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the Millenium Problems, the seven $1,000,000 prize math problems. They’re pretty hard. In fact, I kind of assumed we’d see one solved every forty or fifty years. Well, an eccentric Russian named Grigori [...]
You can use math to blow people’s mind so easily and so casually that it almost feels unfair. I had the pleasure of doing so tonight at a volunteer orientation meeting at the Puget Sound Community School, a pretty awesome Seattle school [...]
No tricks. No formulas. You’re just a human being, looking at one of the simplest and most fundamental shapes there is, just like your ancestors once did before anyone had any idea about formulas. What do you do?
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 [...]
Get tons of free content, like our Games to Play at Home packet, puzzles, lessons, and more!