Last week Stephen Wolfram posted an incredible summary of his talk at the Museum of Math:
We did a project using some of the code here:
Sharing Stephen Wolfram’s MoMath talk with kids
I think the ideas from the talk can provide kids with a really wonderful opportunity to explore math. We’ll hopefully revisit the ideas many times!
Today’s exploration follows the same line of ideas that we followed in the first project. The procedure we are looking at goes like this:
(1) Start with the number 1, and proceed to step 2.
(2) Whatever number you get here, cycle the digits to the left -> so, 123 becomes 231, 1045 becomes 0451 (so just 451 for computations), 110110 becomes 101101, and etc . . .
(3) Now multiply the number from step 2 by a fixed number N and add 1.
(4) Take the output from (3) and return to step (2).
We look at the sequence of outputs from this procedure in base 2, 3, 4, and 5 today. Quite amazingly, Stephen Wolfram showed that this entire procedure could be done with some very short code in Mathematica. Here’s a pic of the short code and also patterns we see in the digits when we multiply by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 at each step when we reun the procedure above in base 4.
If this seems way too complicated I’m not explaining the procedure well enough – go back to our first post on the subject or to Wolfram’s blog. I promise you’ll see that the explorations are totally accessible to kids.
We started our project today by revisiting the results in base 2 and looking for strange or unusual or really anything that caught our eye in the digit patterns.
Also, I’m sorry that the zoomed in shots are so fuzzy (so, the first minute here and basically all of the 4th video). I didn’t realize how bad the footage was until it was published. Even with the fuzziness, though, you can still hear how engaged this kids are and how interesting it was for them to explore all of the strange patterns:
For the 2nd part of the project we looked at the patters of the digits in base 3:
Then we looked at base 4 and immediately saw something that we’d not seen before:
So, having explored bases 2, 3, and 4 we went back to some of the patterns we’d seen and got a nice surprise – we were able to find structure in some of those patterns. This video is the exploration that led to us finding the pattern in base 2.
Again, I’m sorry this video is so fuzzy – wish I would have caught that when we were filming 😦
Now we moved on to exploring some of the patterns that we’d seen in base 3 and base 4 – that exploration allowed us to predict a pattern in base 5 even though we’d not yet looked at any of the digit patterns in base 5!
I can’t wait to play with Wolfram’s ideas a bit more. The ideas are such a great way to expose kids to exploration in math!
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