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# Posts

### October 22, 2014

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Tina Cardone typically blogs at Drawing on Math. She attended the Northwestern Math Conference earlier this month and has recapped her first day and second two days there, including sessions on algebra, algebraic thinking, modeling, problem solving, and engagement.
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Math teachers at play #79 blog carnival is up!Go check it out. I found for example these interesting resources:A variation of Sudoku puzzle plus a link to many more. Spider web math art - I want to do this one with my kids.
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Dan Anderson commented on my Pentaflake post to observe that the pentaflake can also be created by a random process, sometimes called the Chaos Game. In this game you start with an arbitrary point and dilate it toward a target point that’s randomly chosen from some set of points that you’ve established. You then dilate […]
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The PhotoMath App could revolutionize math for students struggling with the subject. Here’s how it works: open the app, take a picture of the math problem, and let the app work its magic. The app shows a step-by-step problem solving approach. Click here to check out the video and read more about MicroBLINK, PhotoMath’s parent...
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No summary available for this post.
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Want to enrich your Precalculus course with difficult problems? Look no further! I teach a high-octane version of Precalculus to students in our magnet program. Our course, like most Precalculus courses, covers a very wide variety of topics. As often … Continue reading →
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Starting Monday, you guys should be organized in new groups. No group can have three members that are together in the current groups. When I arrive on Monday, the groups should already be formed. You guys should start working on the laboratory on Polyhedra, Chapter 7. Make sure to bring whatever materials may be needed […]
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A very different kind of excursion last Sunday, to Evoa, a nature reserve near the Tejo estuary. Quite a drive from Lisboa: along the highway to Vila Franca, and the iron bridge which was the last bridge across the Tejo … Continue reading →
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May the Divine Light of Diwali shine with Peace, Prosperity, Happiness and Good Health in your life.Happy Diwali 2014!The Vedic Math Forum India Worlds Fastest Mental Math System http://www.vedicmathsindia.org
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Each day I start the class with a Number Talk. I thought to continue building our multiplication strategies and make connections to our volume work, I would do Dot Quick Images. This is one of the images that I did yesterday: In this image I hoped to bring out the commutative and associative properties (not […]
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It’s Wednesday, and that means it’s Student Choice for today’s opener.  This week’s ideas comes from Katie, who loves dolphines.  An article from Discovery claims that dolphins may be math geniuses, using the subtraction of echos from their built-in sonar … Continue reading →
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You may know that about 80 percent of the world’s income is from the richest 20 percent, or that 80 percent of health care costs in America derive from 20 percent of the patients. But why does this happen? I have uploaded a new video that demonstrates the 80-20 rule in a simple experiment involving […]
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An upcoming paper appearing at CoNext will be of interest to any Bloom Filter user or aficionado:Cuckoo Filter:  Practically Better than Bloom(Bin Fan, David Andersen, Michael Kaminsky, Michael Mitzenmacher)Let me describe a cuckoo filter and some of what's in the paper for you.  If you want to avoid a technical discussion, all you need to know is that for reasonably large sized sets, for the same false positive rate as a corresponding Bloom filter, cuckoo filters use less space than […]
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Back by popular demand, we present to you Funny Little Calculus Text by Robert W. Ghrist.  You can buy a copy of this in Google Play at https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Robert_W_Ghrist_FLCT_Funny_Little_Calculus_Text! [...]
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Centrifugal and Centripetal Forces   by Dywiann Xyara (Abstract-scientist)   http://im-possible.info/english/art/pencil/dywiann-xyara.html#centrifugal   Artist - http://abstract-scientist.deviantart.com/
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Everything You Hate About Your Kid's 'New Math' May Be Wrong ​: Linda Sharp: I’ve been pretty vocal about my frustrations with my son’s math worksheets in recent years. Last year I wrote a post berating myself for not being able to understand his second-grade homework, what with the confusing blocks, lines, and swoopy curves he was using to figure out a subtraction problem that I’d been taught to solve via a comparatively simple (to my eyes, anyway) column. “Is this really intended to […]
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A presentation by Mark Green at the AMS Committee on Education meeting, October 2014
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10 of our favorite stories from across all of WordPress.
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(via MichaelMaggs/Wikimedia)Math fans usually like chess, so I'll refer readers to FiveThirtyEight's first mini-documentary film (17 mins.), on the historic 1997 match between then-World-Champion Garry Kasparov and IBM's "Deep Blue" (actually it's the RE-match that Kasparov LOST). Some interesting history... and following its victory and acclaim, Deep Blue "retired":http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-man-vs-the-machine-fivethirtyeight-films-signals/
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I'm reproducing my comment to the post, "Who Needs Algebra?"on Mr. Honner's outstanding blog... http://mrhonner.com/archives/14291#comment-10579. I strongly recommend you  read all of his excellent pieces. The current one is compelling for all math educators not to mention the public... MY COMMENTS... First of all requiring an in-depth conceptual understanding of algebra for all students shows complete insensitivity to special needs students and their longsuffering […]
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I’ve recently been looking at the following paper in which -TQFT anomalies are treated carefully and various old constructions of Turaev and Walker are elucidated: Gilmer, P.M. and Masbaum, G., Maslov Index, Mapping Class Groups, and TQFT, Forum Math. 25 (2013), 1067-1106. It makes me think a lot about just what the anomaly `actually means’… […]
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Need a new wallpaper for your computer?  If so, why not make it "mathy" by using some of the ones provided below!  To save a copy, click the image you want and select the Download! link. [...]
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There's been a lot of talk lately about the power of collaboration. The best thing a teacher can do to improve their practice is learn from other teachers. The main lesson coming from Shanghai is that their teachers get much more time to collaborate than we do. So, given that we spend the majority of our time (at work and at home) marking and planning lessons, how can we make time to learn
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The Committee for the Advancement of Theoretical Computer Science put together an open letter to several research leaders at Microsoft. We feel that there should have been a better way to close down this lab, one that would have allowed them to have continuous employment until academic jobs are available again in September 2015. Given that this lab was continuing to produce exceptional — indeed revolutionary — research, we fail to understand why closing it had to be done so suddenly. I […]
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My weight loss progress is progress no more. I am stuck at 225. I have my morning routine. I wake up and jog to the facilities; then I weigh myself. Why do I do this in this order? Because I do not use an alarm-clock. I depend on my own hydro-alarm that wakes me up […]
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Weil es immer weniger Kinder gibt, werden überall Schulen geschlossen. Das hat zur Folge, dass die Schulen um jeden Schüler kämpfen und auch bereitwilliger Schüler aufnehmen, als sie das vor zwanzig Jahren getan hätten. Und das hat zur Folge, dass speziell den Haupt- und Realschulen die Schüler davonlaufen. Sie werden … Continue reading →
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This year’s Wolfram Data Summit brought together innovators in data science, creators of connected devices, and leaders of major data repositories for two days of high-level discussion about challenges and opportunities facing the worldwide data community. This annual Summit offers an exclusive group of thought leaders an opportunity to meet and share insights into new [...]
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Exploring The Epic Chess Match Of Our Time: FiveThirtyEight: FiveThirtyEight and ESPN Films follow the drama of those nine days in a short documentary film, “The Man vs. The Machine,” directed by Frank Marshall. The story — part of FiveThirtyEight’s new digital short series, “Signals” — hinges on a single move, the 44th move of the second game. [source: mme rss]
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Earlier today I saw a tweet from Luke (@bettermaths) which said that the subject of those evenings #mathschat was “how should we assess year 9, in light of the new 1-9 grading system?” This got me thinking about year 9. It’s a funny year group in general. Traditionally it falls within key stage 3, but […]
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Someone on the internet asks: What percentage of the natural numbers have the digit ‘seven’ in them? This is going to sound like a weird answer: it’s 100%. I know, I know: you can point at 42 and 100 and 986,543,210 and 666,666,666,666,666 and at least a handful of others – so surely 100% can’t be right? (As an aside: you can reasonably say that there are as many ‘seven-free’ numbers as there are ‘sevenful’ ones as there are infinitely many […]