My wife and kids are going hiking today and I was looking for any fairly light project to do with the boys before they left. This morning I thought playing around with the Goldbach Comet would be a fun idea. We learned about it last week in Numberphile’s Goldbach Conjecture video:
Our first project from that video is here:
Sharing Numberphile’s Goldbach Conjecture video with kids
Today’s project needs a little disclaimer . . . . Sometimes when I decide to try something at the last minute things actually work out ok. Today was much more stumbling around than usual, unfortunately. But we had fun exploring anyway.
So, we started with some simple Mathematica code to explore the number of ways to write an even integer as the sum of two primes:
I gave the boys a challenge of finding the largest even number that can be written as the sum of two primes in 6 different ways. Then we played around a bit more – stumbling around aimlessly . . . .
Finally we used a program from the Wolfram Demonstrations Project to play around with the Goldbach Comet. That project we used is here:
The Goldbach Coment on the Wolfram Demonstrations Project site
I mainly used the code here to ask the kids what they thought they were seeing.
So, a fun project despite the numerous stumbles. I’d actually never heard of the Goldbach Comet prior to the Numberphile video. It was neat to play with.
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