Imagine you have two coins. One side is blank, and one has a single dot. You flip the coins. How many ways can you get 0 dots? How many ways can you get 1 dot? How many ways can you get 2 dots?
If you got answers like “1 way / 2 ways / 1 way” you got it right.
I was reading a book about numbers recently, and almost put it down when it started talking about prime numbers. The author had tried to work out the prime factors of 72, got as far as 2 x 2 x 2 x 9, then said “you guessed it, 9 is a prime number!” Arrgh!
This post is wrong!! It’s been pointed out that adding salt to boiling water raises the boiling point. It doesn’t lower it. So something very strange was happening in the experiment below. Perhaps it was just a screwy thermometer??
Just for a change, here’s a post about Chemistry. Or Physics, some might argue. I say Chemistry.
My son had just finished some questions in a science workbook, and I had to mark it. Unfortunately, there was one question I didn’t know the answer to – does adding salt to water lower its boiling point?
In an earlier post, I discussed whether math was really real, or just made up. I came to the conclusion that there’s a difference between the math that is implicit in the laws of logic, and the math that people happen to study and learn. The difference is that the latter is much much smaller than the former.
When we learn that, say, 2+2=4, is that something really true about the universe, or is it something some caveman made up? Does a cube exist as something more than just a figment of our imagination?
Here’s how my four-year-old responded when I threw him a curly math question – it’s cute!
We were trying to teach him to count backwards…
My son wrote an essay on math the other day. I thought I’d reproduce it here. You can think of him, therefore, as my first ‘guest blogger’. I’ve edited it only very slightly.
Are you a Wikipedian? Then you may like to know that Dr Mike’s Math Games for Kids (this website) is now “notable” according to Wikipedia’s standards.
Benoît Mandelbrot has passed away.
Mandelbrot is one of the few mathematicians whose contributions – at least some of them – can be immediately recognised and appreciated by a number of non-mathematicians. His name is attached to the now famous Mandelbrot set, beautiful pictures of which are immediately recognizable, and stunningly beautiful.
According to the news, there’s a psychic octopus in Germany. Apparently, Paul the Octopus is able to predict the outcome of the FIFA world cup games. Well, they don’t actually know the octopus is psychic – maybe he’s just very good at analysing the strengths and weaknesses of the various teams. Or maybe he’s just lucky.