For a math project this month I’m having my younger son (in 9th grade) read a chapter of Jordan Ellenberg’s How not to be Wrong each day. The book is terrific if you’ve not read it.
Yesterday my son read chapter 2 and today I asked him to pick three things that he thought were interesting or just caught his eye.
The first was the way the Greeks thought about pi:
The next thing he found interesting was Zeno’s paradox:
Finally, we talked about some of the really neat ideas about infinite series in the chapter:
I doubt that we’ll do a project on every chapter, but there are so many neat ideas in the book so I bet we’ll get to have at least 5 fun discussions. The book isn’t really aimed directly at kids, but I think most of the ideas are accessible. It’ll be fun to see what he thinks the interesting ideas are!
Mike's Math Page 