## A strange homework problem

One of my older son’s homework problems asked him to find 3 digit multiples of 7 whose digit sums were also multiples of 7. I was puzzled by this problem had it on my mind most of the day today.

I hoped that talking through it would help me understand what the math idea was behind the problem. Sadly no, but we still had a good talk.

Here’s the problem and the work my son did:

So – still quite puzzled about the problem – I decided to see if there was anything quirky that came up looking at a divisibility rule for 7 with 3 digit numbers. This gave us a nice opportunity to talk about modular arithmetic:

Finally, since I wasn’t making any progress seeing the point of the original problem, I had him talk about other divisibility rules that he knew:

So, a nice conversation, but I’m actually baffled. I’ll have to ask the author of the problem what he was trying to get at – I feel like I’m missing the point.

## A second project from the Wrong but Useful podcast

Yesterday afternoon I was listening to rest of the latest (as of August 31, 2017) Wrong but Useful podcast. That podcast is here:

The Wrong but Useful podcast on Itunes

A little project we did from a “fun fact” mentioned in the first part of the podcast is here:

Exploring a fun number fact I heard on Wrong but Useful

The second half of the podcast was a really interesting discussion of math education. One thing that caught my attention was comparing math education to music education and the idea of having students do “math recitals.”

Another part that caught my attention was a problem used mainly to see the work of the students rather than the specific answers. That problem is roughly as follows:

Find two numbers that multiply to be 1,000,000 but have the property that neither is a multiple of 10.

Here’s how my younger son approached the problem – it was absolutely fascinating to me to see how he thought about it.

Here’s what my older son did. Much more in line with what I was expecting.

Fun little project – definitely check out the Wrong but Useful podcast if you like hearing about math and math education.

## Exploring a fun number fact I heard on Wrong but Useful

I was listening to the latest episode of Wrong but Useful today:

The Wrong but Useful podcast on Itunes

During the podcast the following “fun fact” came up -> $\ln(2)^5 \approx 0.16$.

I thought exploring this fact would be a fun activity for the boys and spent the next 30 min daydreaming about how to turn it into a short project. I also wanted the project to be pretty light since today was the first day of school for them. Eventually I decided to explore various expressions of the form $\ln(M)^N$ via continued fractions and see what popped up.

We started by looking at the approximation given in the podcast. During the course of the discussion we got to talk about the relationship between fractions and decimals:

Now we looked at some powers of $\ln(3)$ until the phone rang. We found a neat relationship with the 5th power. This relationship was also mentioned in the podcast.

While I was on the phone I asked the boys to explore a little bit. Here’s what they showed me when I got back.

Oh, wait – EEEk – I just noticed writing this up that we counted back incorrectly in this video. Whoops! Here’s the number we thought we were exploring -> $\ln(12)^{15}$ is very nearly equal to 850,454 + 19,118 / 28207.   The next approximation that is better is 850,454 + 33,481,089 / 49,398,529.

You can see in the pic below that the 19,118/28,207 is accurate to 12 decimal places!

Sorry for this mixup.

Next they showed me one more good approximations that they found -> $\ln(8)^{18}$ is nearly an integer. After that I tried to show them one I found but we ran into a small technical problem, so no need to watch the rest of the video after we finish with $\ln(8)^{18}$.

Finally, I got the technical glitch fixed and showed them that $\ln(11)^2$ is approximately 5 3/4. The next better approximation is 5 + 1,907 / 2,543

So, a fun little number fact to study. Sorry for the bits of the project that went wrong, but hope the idea is still useful!

## Sharing Gary Rubinstein’s Perfect Number video with my 6th grader

Saw a neat tweet from Gary Rubinstein earlier in the week:

Our first project with his videos used his “Russian Peasant” multiplication video. That project is here:

Using Gary Rubinstein’s “Russian Peasant” video with kids

Today my older son is away at camp, so I was working with my younger son alone. I asked him to pick another one of Rubinstein’s videos and he picked the one on perfect numbers.

After watching the video I sat down with him to do a project – there was enough in Rubinstein’s video to easily fill three short videos, but we did just one. It was absolutely incredible to see how much my son took out of the perfect number video. There’s a fun and totally unexpected and unplanned connection with the Russian Peasant video at the end, too:

I love it when the projects go this well 🙂

## Two AMC8 problems that gave the boys a bit of trouble

I had a couple of things going on today and just asked the kids to work through an AMC 8 rather than doing a longer project. Each had one problem that gave them some trouble, so we turned those problems into a short discussion.

Here’s the first problem – this one gave my younger son some trouble – it is #21 from the 1992 AMC 8:

Here’s our discussion of the problem:

Here’s the 2nd problem – it is problem #24 from the 1999 AMC 8.

There’s some questionable advice from me and also some terrible camera work, but it was a nice discussion!

I like using the AMC problem to help the kids see a wide variety of accessible mathematical ideas. Despite being in a bit of a rush today, this was a fun project.

## Going through an IMO problem with kids

Last week I saw this problem on the IMO and thought that the solution was accessible to kids:

The problem is problem #1 from the 2017 IMO, just to be clear.

My kids were away at camp during the week, but today we had a chance to talk through the problem. We started by reading it and thinking about some simple ideas for approaching it:

The boys thought we should begin by looking at what happens when you start with 2. Turns out to be a good way to get going – here’s what we found:

In the last video we landed on the idea that looking at the starting integer in mod 3 was a good idea. The case we happened to be looking at was the 2 mod 3 case and we found that there would never be any repetition in this case. Now we moved on to the 0 mod 3 case. One neat thing about this problem is that kids can see what is going on in this case even though the precise formulation of the idea is probably just out of reach:

Finally, we looked at the 1 mod 3 case. Unfortunately I got a little careless at the end and my attempt to simply the solution for kids got a little to simple. I corrected the error when I noticed the mistake while writing up the video.

The error was not being clear that when you have a perfect square that is congruent to 1 mod 3, the square root can be either 1 or 2 mod 3. The argument we go through in the video is essentially the correct argument with this clarification.

It is pretty unusual for an IMO problem to be accessible to kids. It was fun to show them that this problem that looks very complicated (and was designed to challenge some of the top math students in the world!) is actually a problem they can understand.

## Playing around with the PCMI books

After seeing a plug for them on twitter I bought the PCMI books. They arrived yesterday:

The first book I picked up was Moving Things Around since the shape on the cover of the book is (incredibly) the same shape we studied in a recent project.

One more look at the Hypercube

I found a neat problem in the beginning of the book that by another amazing coincidence was similar to a (totally different!) problem we looked at recently:

Revisiting Writing 1/3 in binary

We started by talking about the books and the fun shape on the cover:

Now we moved on to the problem. It goes something like this:

Consider the number 0.002002002…. in base 3. What is this number? How about in base 4,5,7, and n?

We started in base 3 and the boys had two pretty different ways to solve the problem!

Next we moved on to base 4:

Now we moved to the remaining questions of base 5, 7 and N. Unfortunately I got a phone call I had to take in the middle of this video, so I had to walk away while the solution to the “N” part was happening.

We finished up with the challenge problem -> What is 0.002002002…. in base 2?

This is a pretty neat challenge problem 🙂

Definitely a fun start to playing around with the PCMI books. Can’t wait to try out a few more problems with the boys!

## Exploring induction and the pentagonal numbers

Yesterday we did a fun project based on this tweet by James Tanton:

That project is here:

Exploring a neat problem from James Tanton

During the project yesterday we touched on mathematical induction and also on the pengatonal numbers. Today I wanted to revisit those ideas with slightly more depth.

We started with a quick review of yesterday’s project:

Now we looked at a mathematical induction proof. The example here is:

$1 + 3 + 5 + \ldots + (2n - 1) = n^2$

(the nearly camera ran out of batteries, that’s why this part is split into two videos)

Here’s the 2nd part of the induction proof after solving the battery problem:

To wrap up the project we went to the living room to build some shapes with our Zometool set. The Zome shapes really helped the boys make the connection between the numbers and geometry.

The boys really liked this project. In fact, my younger son spent the 30 min after we finished making the decagonal numbers 🙂

## One more trip through Goldbach’s comet with the kids

We’ve now down a couple of projects on the latest Numberphile video on the Goldbach Conjecture:

Sharing Numberphile’s Goldbach Conjecture video with kids

Exploring the Goldbach Comet with kids

Following those projects I thought it would be neat to let the computer run and find the numbers that could be written as a sum of two primes in many different ways (specifically, in more ways than any number less than it). Looking at those results produced a nice surprise:

An unexpected surprise for me in the Goldbach Comet

A double surprise was that Numberphile had just (the day before) published a follow up Goldbach Conjecture video that talks a little bit about the idea that explains the pattern I was seeing:

Last night I walked the kids through some of the ideas. We first watched the end of the Numberphile video and then talked about it briefly.

Also, I was pretty under the weather yesterday, so sorry for the low energy from me in this project:

Next we moved on to looking at the Goldbach Comet and told them about the project I was looking at while they were up in New Hampshire hiking.

They noticed the same pattern that I saw and I showed them the prime factorizations of a few of the numbers on my list.

After we talked about the factoring, I wanted to show them another surprise – the Goldbach Comet looks surprisingly symmetric around the numbers that can be written as the sum of two primes in lots of ways.

Fianlly, we wrapped up the project by looking at the symmetry I mentioned above a bit more carefully. I’d like to explore this symmetry a bit more myself!

We’ve really had a fun set of projects on the Goldbach Conjecture. It is definitely accessible to kids and a great way to show them an unsolved problem in math!

## Exploring the Goldbach Comet

My wife and kids are going hiking today and I was looking for any fairly light project to do with the boys before they left. This morning I thought playing around with the Goldbach Comet would be a fun idea. We learned about it last week in Numberphile’s Goldbach Conjecture video:

Our first project from that video is here:

Sharing Numberphile’s Goldbach Conjecture video with kids

Today’s project needs a little disclaimer . . . . Sometimes when I decide to try something at the last minute things actually work out ok. Today was much more stumbling around than usual, unfortunately. But we had fun exploring anyway.

So, we started with some simple Mathematica code to explore the number of ways to write an even integer as the sum of two primes:

I gave the boys a challenge of finding the largest even number that can be written as the sum of two primes in 6 different ways. Then we played around a bit more – stumbling around aimlessly . . . .

Finally we used a program from the Wolfram Demonstrations Project to play around with the Goldbach Comet. That project we used is here:

The Goldbach Coment on the Wolfram Demonstrations Project site

I mainly used the code here to ask the kids what they thought they were seeing.

So, a fun project despite the numerous stumbles. I’d actually never heard of the Goldbach Comet prior to the Numberphile video. It was neat to play with.