Yesterday we did a really fun project inspired by a tweet from Steven Strogatz:
Here’s tweet:
Here’s the project:
Steven Strogatz’s circle-area exercise
During the 3rd part of our project yesterday the boys wondered how the triangle from Strogatz’s tweet would change if you had more pieces. They had a few ideas, but couldn’t really land on a final answer.
While we punted on the question yesterday, as I sort of daydreamed about it today I realized that it made a great project all by itself. Unlike the case of the pieces converging to the same rectangle, the triangle shape appears to converge to a “line” with an area of 
So, we started with a quick review of yesterday’s project:
The first thing we did was explore how we could arrange the pieces if we cut the circle into 4 pieces.
After that we looked for patterns. We found a few and my younger son found one (around 4:09) that I totally was not expecting – his pattern completely changed the direction of today’s project:
In this section of the project we explored the pattern that my son found as we move from step to step in our triangles. After understanding that pattern a bit more we found an answer to the question from yesterday about how the shape of the triangle changes as we add more pieces.
Both kids thought it was strange that the shape became very much like a line with a finite area.
The last thing that we did was investigate why the odd integers from 1 to N add up to be $late N^2$. My older son found an algebraic solution (which, just for time purposes I worked through for him) and then we talked about the usual geometric interpretation.
So, a great two day project with lots of fun twists and turns. So glad I saw Strogatz’s tweet on Friday!
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