This is a great example where mathematicians applied some creative thinking to solve a very real world problem. It is Abraham Wald’s Survivorship Bias problem. To help explain the sequence of concepts that lead to his insight, we made some wooden planes to help visualize the problem, and the solution. We start out thinking about the planes that come back
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MathHappens Foundation and STEM Santa Fe partnered together to host a week’s worth of camp sessions for a group of 27 students from March 15-19. Camp sessions were led by MathHappens staff, Lauren Siegel, Josephine Sheng, Elizabeth Wrightsman, Anh Nguyen and Viyang Shah and group discussions were led by a group of facilitators including Naila Hajiyeva, and Quan Nguyen who
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Here’s another great organization dedicated to getting the math out to the people, Public Math at https://www.public-math.org. They have just issued an annual report that is full of fun and interesting ways you can share math in public, and it lists all the great people doing this work with them. These projects, like the postcard project or the math vending
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How can educator forge better relationships with their community? This is a great example of reaching out to the community, providing useful information and showing how some calculations can be important in our day to day life. In fall 2017 Amy Gross decorated a table, created a display of information, shared her hydration tracking system and samples of fruit infused
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Here are two fun puzzles you can find in this classic book. The files to make them are right here! (secret: The wood is colored with Bingo stampers) Moscow Flower and Crayfish, Laser cut file types: Corel 2020, Adobe Illustrated, SVG, JPG
We were happy to have a submission to the NY Times accepted for publication. We wrote some directions for making a Sonobe cube and if you make 27, you can make the parts of a Soma made some graphics files, but the editorial team makes it all look beautiful. Also the photographer is pretty amazing! We also had a nice
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You don’t need robots and computers, just a system and apparatus to organize the steps! This model is based on the results alluded too but not completely explained by an Israeli company in the recent NY Times article by David Halbfinger on creative pool testing options. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/health/fast-coronavirus-testing-israel.html Trying to come up with one of these is a great activity for
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Elizabeth Lay, Claire Steffen and I had the opportunity to present a webinar through the Texas Historical Commission today. We discussed ways that museums can enhance visitor experiences with math, showed a variety of examples of math activities at museum locations and talked about our process in developing connected activities. Our Presentation Slides are here The Handout Recording Hosted by
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Here’s a fun one! Inspired by a conversation with Chris Daniels of Public Math. He said roll paper around a cylinder and cut on an angle to get an ellipse and produce a sine wave. So we did! And you can too. Then you can make a roller from ellipses, reflect your sine curve and roll the elliptical roller along
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Here’s an excerpt of a twitter conversation. Day before yesterday Aida wrote to get access to some of our files and ideas. Yesterday she made this amazing version of Napiers Bones that is in the National Archeological Museum in Madrid. Today I’m inspired by her project and want to know more about this version and I want to see that
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