105 – cто пять – cent cinq – ciento cinco

• 105 is a triangular number.  Here are the first four triangular numbers.  Get it?  Can you figure out which triangular number 105 is?  How did you decide?

• In the year 105 AD Ts’ai Lun of China created paper from hemp, tree bark, rags and fishnets that quickly replaced silk and bamboo strips. Papermaking didn’t reach Europe until the 12th century. 

• 105 only has 3 prime factors:  3, 5, and 7

• The atomic number of hahnium, also known as dubnium is 105.

• State Route 105 is a highway in the south-central part of the U.S. state of Maine. SR-105 begins in Augusta at Cony Circle where it junctions with U.S. Route 201 and continues east approximately 45 miles (72 km) until it terminates atU.S. 1 in Camden. It is regarded as one of the most scenic drives in Maine.

• China National Highway 105 (G105) runs from Beijing to Zhuhai, via Langfang, Chuangzhou, Dezhou, Donge, Jining, Shuangyou, Fuyang, Liuan, Jiujiang, Nanchang, Ji’an and Guangzhou. It runs to approximately 2,717 km, and, on a map, runs broadly on a straight line from Beijing to Guangzhou.  Through the Lotus Bridge it is connected to Macau.

• Hot 105 FM is a popular radio station in Hollywood Florida

• p. 105 of War and Peace begins “Prince Andrei was leaving the next evening.”

• The other book I’m reading:  The Extraordinary Advenures of Alfred Kropp, begins thus on p. 105:  “The Sword has the power to heal as well as to rend.”
  

Just sayin’.  

Best,

LaForge

References:

Wells, D. The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers London: Penguin Group. (1987): 134, via Wikipedia

http://www.puzzles.com/puzzlesineducation/handsonpuzzles/TriangularNumbers.htm

My copies of War and Peace (the new translation) and Alfred Kropp

Euler’s Birthday

It is Leonard Euler’s birthday today.  The Google doodle above is animated, a little bit, so if you click it, above, I have linked to the doodle.  Here’s what Time had to say…

Click to get the entire article, which includes this provocative paragraph…

Provocative WHY?  Because there was a poll in 1988?!?!  And I missed it?  Well, okay, I was 19, but still…

AWESOME.  Just saying.  Here is a link to another mathematical blogger.  He is very engaging and has some excellent puzzles on his site:  The Math Less Travelled

Best wishes to you all, and with sympathy for those affected by the Boston tragedy today,

M. LaForge

Coolest Library Ever! SO much to count and read.

I love counting things. This library is SOOO appealing for this, among other, reasons. Cincinnati Public Library 1974. Click to see the WHOLE picture from Retronaut.com

Thinking about Units and, well…cake.

A quick recap.  I asked a group of people what 8+9 was and a few brave souls said 17.  Some more reticent folks chimed in with loud nods and “mmmhmmm”‘s.  Still others held their peace.  When asked “How do you know?”, I received 5 answers:

• I had it memorized.
• I doubled 8 and added 1.
• I doubled 9 and subtracted 1.
• I was teaching base 10 the other day and so I thought 1-ten and seven 1’s.
• Not enough information.  I need units.

This last from a self (and university) proclaimed engineer who noted that if the 8 is 8 inches and the 9 is nine feet then you’ll be adding 8 inches to 108 inches for a total of 116 inches.  He is a friend and colleague so I gently mocked him, but on not much further reflection, I had to admit that it was a great answer.

Then I was thinking about how I promised to post my Flourless Chocolate Cake recipe, for M&S if for no one else and I was looking for my pan so I could show the pan that the cake goes in..

.<first pan picture…the BanPan because this is how I found it>

and I started wondering about the volume of the cake.  If I ate the whole cake by myself, would I have eaten the equivalent of…what?  What would be meaningful…the bottles of iced tea I drink?  Four apples?  How many chickpeas?  And this is pure volume, not calories or anything like that.  But then I got distracted again, because the next picture I took of the pan looked like this:

Oooh.  Look at the cool shape the light made.  So–of course–I imported it into Grapher which is a program for Macs that I believe is free and it is AWESOME.  It will show you the pictures that go with the stories that the equations were created to tell or to describe.  And then I made a line, a leftward facing parabola and a circle so that together they would make that shape carved out by the light.  Here it is!  First with the coordinate grid and then without.  And I darkened the lines and made them turquoise.  (Love Grapher.)

And then I thought that maybe you would like to see the equations, in case you wanted to do something like this yourself.  I KNOW they look complicated, but it really just three shapes, told to not go too far.

OK, so MAYBE I’ll get back to volume some time.  Next post.  But I do have other things to share with you.

TWITTER did right by me this weeks.  Check these out:

And this leads you to the “It’s OK to be smart” website and from there to a site which reports newly published papers on physics…

One more from JH that leads you to an unusual artist, featured at the blog…

and here is a picture of the fog, sculpted.  Click the picture to read more about this artist’s process:

Don’t you want to see them?  Here’s one.  Click to get more.

Click to see it!

This one too!

I think I’ll end there.  I have articles on Girls in Stem, including an article written by 17 year old Catherine Wong about Science in High School.  But my brain is feeling pretty happy right now and I think I’ll go listen to an audiobook while I clean up.  I really wish someone would make an audio version of Dianne Wynne Jones’ Fire and Hemlock, but today I’ll be happy with Laurie R. King’s Garment of Shadows, a Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell mystery.

I’ll leave you with one last (funny) picture of my Flourless Chocolate Cake pan, and the recipe.  I hope you can read it.  Oh, and a at the top is a picture of my youngest daughter with a camera made out of cans.  Because who doesn’t want to see that?

Happy Saturday!
Michele LaForge  

P.S. I realize that the instructions on the cake are skimpy to the point of not being there at all.  Next time…

What is YOUR favorite number? Why?

From the novel Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese, one character’s answer this question. I love his answer.

I cannot tell you how much I LOVE the blog Rational Expressions. But, as you suspected, I will try.

Okay, first, I want to dance a little happy dance every time I see yesterday’s entry in this teacher’s blog.  It does so many thing right.

1.  Story.  ONE (there are many others) very powerful way of learning math is to look at it as a language, as a translation of data (characters, events) into story with verbs (operations) and modifiers (exponents showing quicker growth than multipliers, for instance).  Check out his pictures.  Can you make up a story to go with them?  Nothing is more powerful.

Two.  A blog about teaching and learning that is reflective and questioning in this way is such a wonderful way to learn and teach.  I admire him.

Three.  The title Rational Expressions.  I’m dancing again.  Not only extremely important  mathematical vocabulary but its meaning in the everyday world is compelling too, with its connections to logic and tolerance and voice and sharing.  I love it.

4.  I will stop talking now.  But here are the first three pictures on this post, so you don’t have to go anywhere else to see them, but at the end there is a little button (called “little button”)  Click it and check out his blog.

Ms. LaForge

My J. Alfred Prufrock Wordle and also My Trig Wordle!

Many ways to use Wordle, including analysis.

Here’s my trig wordle:

This, from today’s PLG training.  Laura Girr linked us to a blog that gave 40 ways to use wordle.  Here are some of those ways from

A few mathy things March 27, 2013 and don’t make me explain to you again how EVERYTHING is mathy

NUMBER 1:

The Irresistable Book of the Week to be ordered from Longfellow Books:

Each dated page allows you to fill in your schedule or jot down a creative response to the artwork, turning it into a weird and wonderful hybrid of datebook, sketchbook and daily art journal. Featured in the book are favorite artist

Seems to me an interesting way to record happenings at MY school, OUR school.  Kids will have free access to it.  They can see my schedule but also what I am thinking and learning about during the day.

NUMBER 2:

Oooh.  Click on the tweet to get the link at goodreader.com.

NUMBER 3:  Anything from Greeley High School Librarian Heather Perkinson is worth following up on!  Here’s one from a few days ago…

Each person gives 3 good things to read, watch, and have in their toolkit.  Heather’s excellent suggestion is to have our teachers contribute or (in my mind) do our own one like it.

NUMBER 4:  A writer whose work I respect and like, Steven Brust, keeps a website called the Dream Cafe.  I went to look at the cover art for his next book and also, quite honestly to see what John Scalzi said there that prompted this tweet from Steven Brust:

To continue being honest, I still don’t know because whatever it was that was lovable is either in code or…gone?  Well, in any case, I found myself on this great fantasy writer’s website and in the upper right hand corner he has a little spot where quotations he has chosen come up.  Three that made me think, or laugh, today:

NUMBER 5: Okay, this is really getting to be enough for one day, but I saw a lot of cool things.  One more.  Okay two more.  But that’s it.  Really.  Maybe three.

Seriously, I Love Charts?  This is the best thing ever!  They even have Guest Chartists.  This one was interesting…

If it isn’t obvious why I Love Charts is a great tumbler channel, I don’t know what is.

NUMBER 6:  While using twitter to keep track of sites and bits of news I need to check out later, this tweet from a friend came.  Funny, right?!

NUMBER 7:  In other storytelling news (note to self, mention this to Chris M.) from the Future of Storytelling, a boring (in parts) but also fascinating Virtual Roundtable.

That’s all I am going to put up this afternoon.  I am reading Cold Days by Jim Butcher, and Mary Moore, the FHS librarian, just got in a bunch of new books and I now need to read EON, and also The Unbearable Bookclub for Unsinkable Girls and also The Raven Boys by Maggie Stievalter (did I spell that right?).

LaForge

My life in math March 13, 2013: Mars, Pizza, Pi Day, and What my Librarian Friend Mary Moore is Reading

Look what came in the mail today!

Just in time for Pi Day on Thursday.

I usually dress up fancy for parents on Parent Teacher Conference day, but don’t you think I should wear my new shirt on Pi Day?

In other exciting news, as Joe Hanson said on his AWESOME blog

The number of planets that we know about that could support life has now gone up to…

Mars Rover itself tweeted about it today:

Here is a picture of some of the minerals that it analyzed to find the building blocks of life:

For more information, read the entire awesome and not very long piece here at Joe’s Blog.

<<Changing subjects>>

Tomorrow in Honors Geometry class, I am going to share part of the book from David Levithan that Mary Moore, FHS librarian is reading because it has this awesome mathy part.  Also the book looks good.  Here are the details:

Sixteen-year-old Elijah is completely mellow and his 23-year-old brother Danny is completely not, so it’s no wonder they can barely tolerate one another.So what better way to repair their broken relationship than to trick them into taking a trip to Italy together? Soon, though, their parents’ perfect solution has become Danny and Elijah’s nightmare as they’re forced to spend countless hours together. But then Elijah meets Julia, and soon the brothers aren’t together nearly as much. And then Julia meets Danny and soon all three of them are in a mixed-up, turned-around, never-what-you-expect world of brothers, Italy, and love.

Anyway, here are the pages we are going to look at:

ANOTHER TOPIC CHANGE, AND, IN FACT, ANOTHER TWEET:

What do you think?

Moody’s Mega Math Update below…

Done! (Scroll down to the March Craziness post for the update at the end.)