My older son came home from day 2 of 7th grade today. As we chatted about his day at school he told me that they wrote “math biographies” in math class today. I didn’t press him on what he talked about in his bio, instead I thought it would be fun to use the same idea for a short set of math videos tonight.
Here’s what my older son had to say about his “math biography”
Favorite topics he’s learned about so far: higher dimensions and 3d printing
Topic he’s excited to learn: trigonometry (which he thinks is advanced geometry)
Fun sort of one-off project we’ve done: Creating the 120-cell
An unsolved problem he thinks is neat: The Collatz Conjecture
Topic in math that he’s seen / learned but doesn’t believe: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + . . . . = -1/12
Here’s the whole conversation:
Next up I asked my younger son (mostly) the same questions. Here’s what he had to say:
Favorite topics he’s learned about so far: fractals and binary numbers
Topic he’s excited to learn: Calculus and logs, though he doesn’t know what those topics actually are 🙂 The topic that he knows a little bit about but wants to learn more of is imaginary numbers.
An unsolved problem that he thinks is interesting: the Collatz conjecture. I’m surprised that both boys mentioned this since we probably haven’t talked about it in over a year. It is a fun problem for sure, though.
Something that you’ve learned but don’t necessarily believe: The Koch snowflake has an infinite perimeter and a finite area – yes!!
I really like asking kids about their math biographies – it makes for a really fun conversation!
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