[vimeo url=http://vimeo.com/56524400]
Inspired by the great Geometry Daily blog.
You're reading: Columns
AS maths results and batting averages
Phil Harvey gave a talk on this subject at last November’s MathsJam conference. We liked it so much, we asked him if we could put it on the site. Phil’s kindly written his talk up as an essay for us.
I am 64¼ years old and I’ve been a maths teacher all my working life. In that time things have changed. Long gone are the days when gowned masters would sweep in, silence any murmur with half a raised eyebrow, and delight compliant uniformed schoolchildren with chalk-covered boards of mathematical exposition.
No, you’re right. That never happened outside the covers of Goodbye Mr Chips, even in my day.
The reality then. Schoolchildren have morphed into learners. Exam results rule. Quality (in the sense that Orwell might have used the word) is managed by quality managers. And so our working lives are driven by the pursuit of Ofsted targets, success rates, achievement rates, benchmarks, observation grades, results. And every joyless lesson has its own lesson plan, with aims, objectives, learning outcomes and action points. But above all, those damned results – and every year, year after year, they had to IMPROVE.
Well I was no good at any of this stuff – and consequently I always got on very badly with my managers. Until one year…
Aperiodical Round Up 8: if a bird heard the word ‘surd’
Right, let’s be havin’ ya! My name’s Christian Perfect, I’ve got some links, and you’ve got some eyes. Aperiodical Round Up 8, arriving later than scheduled at Platform Your Face.
Puzzlebomb – January 2013
Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 13 of Puzzlebomb, for January 2013, can be found here:
Puzzlebomb – Issue 13 – January 2013
The solutions to Issue 13 can be found here:
Puzzlebomb – Issue 13 – January 2013 – Solutions
Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found here.
Mathematical Christmas Cracker Jokes
At this time of year, terrible and/or groan-worthy jokes come to the fore, and are completely acceptable, and in some cases encouraged, provided they’re preceded by a bang noise and read out from a tiny piece of paper.
Rummaging around on my computer today, I found a set of mathematical Christmas cracker jokes I wrote for a party thrown for a group of mathematicians a couple of years ago, where I hacked apart a set of crackers and replaced the toys with tiny slide rules, the paper hats with ones cut into fractal curves along the top, and the existing awful jokes with awful mathematical ones. I thought I’d share them with you all, since they’re more likely to be appreciated by maths fans.
Can you do long division? And other questions we’d like answers to.
Do you know how to do long division? I don’t. Prompted by an annoying article I saw, I’d like to know how many people do know how to do long division.
So this is as good an opportunity as any to use a side-project I’ve been working on recently, which I’ve called The Aperiodical’s Mathematical Survey. I’ve asked quite a few questions like the above here or on Twitter, so I thought it would be a good idea to do something systematic about collecting answers to them.
At the moment, I’ve put up a few questions that occurred to me off the top of my head, such as what’s your favourite number?, how do you write the letter $x$?, and of course, can you do long division?
I hope that if I leave the site running long enough, people will drop in and answer questions every now and then. If we get enough answers I’ll do some Science on the responses, otherwise I’ll just have to do some uninformed Punditry instead.
Please go to The Aperiodical’s Mathematical Survey site and answer a question or two.
Deck the halls with τ of holly, formula-la-laaa!
Christmas is a time for giving, celebrating, family and magic. But did you know it’s also a time for equations? Department store Debenhams has decided to honour this recent Christmas tradition by tasking at least two members of Sheffield University’s undergraduate maths society to come up with formulae for ‘a perfectly decorated Christmas tree‘, picked up by The Sun, The Metro and others.
Photo by Aleksandar Cocek, used under a Creative Commons licence.
Previous festive howlers include ‘the formula for the perfect family Christmas‘ (sponsored by The Children’s Society to promote a book) and a prior stab at ‘the equation for the ideal Christmas tree‘ (sponsored by B&Q), which are just nonsensical strings of abbreviations. However, unlike those examples of naff-ematics, the Sheffield tree-decorating equations make enough sense for me to take a critical, overly-serious look at them on their own merits, and show how you might begin to come up with something more rational.