The square problem from the Julia Robinson math festival part 2

Yesterday we did a fun project on a problem I learned from Michael Pershan

Shared this fantastic problem with counselors today.

Link to the Julia Robinson Math Festival psets: https://t.co/0x7EkyepTk
Link to an awesome Numberphile video with a solution: https://t.co/pc15dyAJ0Y pic.twitter.com/EGUEOy3eYL

— Michael Pershan (@mpershan) July 20, 2018

That project is here:

Sharing a problem from the Julia Robinson math festival with the boys

Last night I got an interesting comment on twitter in response to my Younger son suggesting that we write the numbers in a circle – a suggestion that we didn’t pursue:

At the beginning, there was a suggestion to write the numbers in a circle, then draw lines between the pairs. It is worth making a prediction about how that will look. The result may surprise you.

— Rod Bogart (@RodBogart) July 22, 2018

So, today we revisited the problem and wrote the numbers in a circle:

Next I asked them to try to find another set of numbers that would lead us to be able to pair all of the numbers together with the sum of each pair being a square. The discussion here was fascinating and they eventually found

This problem definitely made for a fun weekend. Thanks to Michael Pershan for sharing the problem originally and to Rod Bogart for encouraging us to look at the problem again using my younger son’s idea.