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 … Continue reading Sharing Numberphile’s “Amazing Graphs” video with kids
Last week I attended a summer lecture at MIT by Aaron Pixton about a curious math idea. Here’s the short description of the lecture: “Although the series 1 + 2 + 3 + … diverges, zeta function regularization gives this sum the curious value of -1/12. I will discuss two ways of making sense of … Continue reading Revisiting Numberphile’s 1 + 2 + 3 + . . . = -1/12 video
Numberphile put out a great video on the so-called “pancake number” – see the 3rd video below. I watched it when it came out and thought it would be a fun project for the kids to explore. Unfortunately I got mixed up on the procedure when we were doing the first two parts of the … Continue reading Using Numberphile’s “Pancake Number” video with kids
Numberphile released a really nice video about the Goldbach Conjecture today: I thought it would make an excellent project with the boys even though some of the ideas involving logarithms might be over their head. So, we watched the movie and then talked about some of the ideas that caught their eye. Next we moved … Continue reading Sharing Numberphile’s Goldbach Conjecture video with kids
Numberphile published a beautiful video on the Collatz Conjecture today. I thought it would make for a fantastic project with the kids tonight: We have looked at the Collatz Conjecture before, so we aren’t starting from scratch here. Two of our prior projects are here: Revisiting the Collatz Conjecture the Collatz Conjecture and John Conway’s … Continue reading Sharing Numberphile’s Collatz Conjecture video with kids
Saw this neat tweet from Patrick Honner earlier in the week: The video itself will blow you away: I shared it with Dan Anderson yesterday who made a couple of computer versions of patterns from the video: Sorry the video quality isn’t so great, but it was fun talking through these patterns with the kids. … Continue reading Numberphile’s “Freaky Dot Patterns” video
Ran across an interesting problem in our Introduction to Geometry book today that reminded me of an old Numberphile video. My son didn’t make the connection right away, but he did have some interesting observations about the problem so I thought it would make a fun little project. I wanted to do a quick review … Continue reading Using Numberphile’s “blob Pythagorean theorem” video in a lesson
Yesterday (11/5/2014) Numberphile published a really neat “proof” that all triangles are equilateral: My older son and I are in the middle of reviewing the chapter in our geometry book about similar triangles, so this new video from Numberphile was well-timed for me. We watched the video last night and today I used it as … Continue reading Using Numberphile’s “All triangles are Equilateral” video to talk about constructions
[ not about math with my kids, but about some cool Numberphile videos that came out yesterday, and sorry this one was a little rushed] Yesterday (July 20, 2014) I saw two absolutely incredible Numberphile videos about Graham’s number. Part of what makes them so amazing is that the explanation of the number comes from … Continue reading A small mistake in Numberphile’s videos about Graham’s number
I was having a fun conversation about the Numberphile 1 + 2 + 3 + . . . . = -1/12 video on twitter yesterday, but the limitations of twitter were making the conversation difficult. So I decided to spend a little time today gathering my thoughts on the video, and perhaps more to the … Continue reading The Numberphile infinite series video
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