Yesterday I saw this tweet from Evelyn Lamb:
It inspired me to do a project on prime numbers with the boys. So, I grabbed my copy of Martin Weissman’s An Illustrated Theory of Numbers and looked for a few ideas:
We began by talking about why there are an infinite number of primes:
Next we moved on to taking about arithmetic sequences of prime numbers. There are a lot of neat results about these sequences, though as far as I can tell, they have proofs way beyond what kids could grasp. So instead of trying to go through proofs, we just played around and tried to find some sequences.
I also asked the boys how we could write a computer program to find more and they had some nice ideas:
Next we played with the computer programs. Sorry that this video ran a bit long. As a challenge for kids – why couldn’t we find any 4 term sequences with a difference of 16?
Finally, we looked at Evelyn Lamb’s joke to see if we could understand it!
It is definitely fun to be able to share some elementary ideas in number theory with kids!
Mike's Math Page 