Sharing Numberphile’s “Amazing Graphs” video with kids

Last week Numberphile put out a fantastic video featuring Neil Sloane:

For today’s project we explored the sequence described in the first half of the video. Namely, the sequence that begins with and then continues with depending on the greatest common divisor of and . See either the Numberphile video or the first video below for the full formula.

To introduce the boys to the sequence, I had them calculate the first 10 or so terms by hand:

Next we wrote (off camera) a Mathematica program to calculate many terms of the sequence, and studied what the graph of those terms looked like:

Finally, I asked the boys to watch the Numberphile video and the describe what they learned. They were both able to give a nice explanation of why the sequence eventually repeated:

I love math projects that allow kids to play with really interesting math and also sneak in some k-12 math practice. The first sequence in the Numberphile video is a perfect example of this kind of project!