11.10.9

Earlier this year, on some random Tuesday (maybe in March?), I was inundated with greetings from people wishing me…umm…Happy Prime Number Day!  Or something like that.  I don’t even remember anymore.  It was apparently announced on both national and local radio that it was a special day for some math related reason.  I just remember thinking that someone just made that up.  Unlike Pi Day (3.14), which is a real holiday.  *giggles*

So, in response to someone else’s made up holiday, I’m declaring today as Countdown Day!  11.10.9.  We’ll celebrate it next year on 12.11.10 too, and then we won’t be able to celebrate it again until 2101.

So there!

Math Camp 2009

My work week started with a trip to Math Camp!  It’s the fourth time that I’ve been invited to give a talk about a particularly famous multi-colored cube (you know the one!).  And the kids loved it.  I first teach them the math behind the cube, which is Group Theory, a math they likely won’t see again until they are seniors in college — and even then, they’d have to be math majors to take it!  We go through some two-dimensional exercises with Group Theory, and then I say, “Now we’ll bump it up to 3D and talk about The Cube!”  And their eyes get big.  Unlike the Groups we look at in two dimensions, which have 6, 8, or 24 elements, the famous cube group has over 43 quintillion elements.  It’s CRAZY!

After we do the serious math, I give them a demonstration on how to solve the cube and then I turn them loose to play with the seven cubes that I bring.  (Next year, I swear I’m going to have a cube for every kid!)  And they come up with great questions, and we have a good time.

This time, when I was leaving but still within ear shot of the class, I heard the lead professor say to them, “So, you learned a little about Group Theory today, do you want to learn more?”  I cringed a little, wondering what they would say and thinking they probably enjoyed the demo and play time more than the actual math.  Much to my surprise and pure delight, there was a rousing round of “YES!”  They want to learn more about Group Theory.  Hooray for math!

13,001

A quick tidbit:  One of my teaching colleagues sent me a link for the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine (tailor made for a math geek, yes?).  It has a lot of cool features way beyond doing funny things with dates, but I was most intrigued by the date calculator, which informed me that I was 13,000 days old yesterday!  And today?  13,001.

Putnam Day 2008!

The first Saturday in December is always a Fun Day for anyone interested in crazy math stuff.  It’s the day of the Putnam Competition, which is a 6 hour, 12 question math exam on which the median score is generally either zero or one (out of 120).  I took the Putnam in 2001 and got points (more than one!), which still delights my old profs to no end.

I returned to my alma mater today to share in the joy of the morning part of the competition and the lunch break with the current students.  They were rolling in laughter during almost the entire lunch break, so it was a good day for them!

I had a chance to visit with three faculty, and at some point, all four of us were standing there staring at a giant slide rule for five minutes, trying to figure out what “Cl” on the slide rule stands for.  If that wasn’t a moment of math geekdom at its best…

So, happy Putnam Day to all the math crazies of the world!  Good problems in the morning session this year, yes?  I liked problem A3.

Math camp

The highlight of my summer so far happened this morning, when I got to give a talk at a math camp for high school students.  This was the third year that I was invited to speak, and every year, it’s even more fun than the year before!  My talks are always focused on my master’s thesis topic (about a particularly famous cube), and this year’s students seemed especially engaged with what we were doing and asked a lot of questions, some of which I hadn’t thought about before.  We all had so much fun and could have happily stayed there all day, but alas, they had to go to lunch and off to another session.  They thanked me, but I also thanked them because it truly is an honor to get to share my joy of math with these younger students and to see how well they can learn very advanced math at a young age.

Teaching Thursdays #82

My students and I explored 3-D geometry earlier this week, so I got to bring all sorts of cool things to class.  I made a tetrahedron and an octahedron out of paper, and I brought my famous multi-colored cube as an example of a hexahedron (six sided figure).  I found a dodecahedron in the math education room.  (And yes, that is really the name of something!)  Those four objects are four of the five convex regular polyhedra.  I was missing one!  Thus I yelled down the hall to a colleague…

“Hey, do you have an icosahedron?”  (Only a math teacher would ever utter that sentence!)

And only another math teacher would say, “Yes!  I do.  Did you need to borrow it?”

Do you have an icosahedron? 

Weekend of work

I’ve taken on a few freelance statistics gigs this summer (two of which have deadlines pretty soon), and I think I worked ten times harder this weekend than I did during my work week!  Crazy.  I had to force myself to stop and watch a movie last night before bed so I wouldn’t still have standard deviations dancing in my head at that hour!

How was your weekend?  More fun than that, I hope. 

A good week!

I am having the kind of week where good news and opportunities are greeting me at every turn.  Besides getting my fall teaching schedule early, I have set up a meeting with a prof in the graduate program I hope to be in next year (yay!) and I went to a sign language class (something I’ve wanted to learn forever).  And just now, I got an e-mail asking if I’d give a talk at a fantastic math camp this summer!  Well, yes, of course I would.  I actually gave a talk at the camp a couple of years ago, and it was one of my more fun public speaking engagements.  So, I’m rolling in good news.  And tomorrow, my students are doing my favorite activity (Dice Rollathon) so they’ll be rolling in, well…dice.  Ha!

Math News

The 2006 Putnam (math) Competition results are in, and Princeton placed first!  Their first top finish, I believe.  The way the university teams are ranked is a bit odd, but it’s a huge deal to finish first, so kudos to Princeton!  The median score (out of 120) for the competition/exam was zero across all 3000+ competitors — in fact, nearly 63 percent of the people taking the exam scored zero, which is even more than usual.  It looked like scores overall were relatively low, as one only needed a score of 14 to be in the top 500. 

Pi Day! (3.14)

Happy Pi Day to You!
Happy Pi Day to You!
Do some math in my honor,
’cause it’s so good for you!  *giggles*

Today is Pi Day, a day to celebrate math with parties hosted by various math departments and public schools around the country.  Don’t believe me?  Do a Google search!  You won’t believe what you find!