GeekDad Puzzle of the Week – Consecutive Collatz Conjecture Counts
What number under 10^7 starts the largest “run” of consecutive Collatz Conjecture step counts? The answer could be worth a $50 ThinkGeek Gift Certificate!
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Tag: math
The Fun on Peg + Cat Adds Up This Fall on PBS Kids
If The Chicken Problem is any indication, Peg + Cat will be a fantastic way to get preschoolers like my daughter excited about solving problems.
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Flatland and Sphereland Come to Animated Life
I discovered recently that both Flatland and Sphereland have been made into films, produced by Seth Caplan. Here’s why they’re worth watching.
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Monster Mutants for Your Math Needs
Tom Beatty has launched a new Kickstarter for a program that uses cute monsters to teach multiplication.
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Zooreka and the Odds of Winning
I thought about that this week when I made a bet with the twins as we played Zooreka. If either of them won, they could both stay up 15 minutes later that night. If I won, they would go to bed five minutes earlier. The odds were in their favor as there were two of them and only one of me, but they still agonized over whether to accept the bet. Simple math, I explained to them: they could win more than they could ever lose.
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Just HOW Badly Do You Need that A in Math?
This month a research team at Oxford University reported on their continuation of a study that repeated and built upon a 2010 experiment on a different group of patients: for 5 days, the patients either received real or false electrical stimulations while performing math tasks. Those who received the real stimulations were performing the math tasks two to five times faster than those without.
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Happy Birthday, Sophie Germain!
Today marks the 237th birthday of the French mathematician Sophie Germain (1776-1831). While her work in elasticity was fundamental to the field, her work on proving Fermat’s Last Theorem blew 200 years of previous attempts out of the water. Her story is an inspiring one of self-starting, persistance, and courage. Happy birthday, Germain!
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Because a Geek Has to Do it: Calculating the Dimensions of a New TV
The bulb in our 10 year-old DLP rear-projection TV burnt out for the second time in its lifespan earlier this week. The last time I had to replace it, my journey to secure a bulb ended in haggling with the rather unsavory proprietor of a strip-mall TV repair outlet. As a family, we decided it was time to put the old gray mare out to pasture, and give ourselves a little upgrade.
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No Starch Press Manga Guides Make Science Fun
Have you ever read a textbook cover to cover? I’m in grad school. I’ve had to do it more than once. It usually requires massive amounts of caffeine and re-reading a lot of pages. Well, there’s some good news. No Starch Press has The Manga Guide series on textbook topics, such as statistics, electricity, and molecular biology. The manga books are written by Japanese subject matter experts. They have been translated to English and (thankfully) rearranged to read from left to right.
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week: Old Maid
There are games that are fairly basic like chess, Othello and mahjong. And then there’s Old Maid. At my house, we’ve been playing some serious Maid and when I play, I play to win. Which is why I need your …
Continue ReadingMath Teachers Discover KenKen Is a Fun and Educational Tool
Math teachers are finding that the Sudoku-like math game, KenKen is a great way to engage, entertain, and educate students.
Continue ReadingHow to Defeat a Dragon With Math
Ted Ed puts out this wonderfully fun video, starring GeekDad Garth Sundem, telling the story of how the Musketeers of Pi defeat a dragon using the order of operations.
Continue Reading4 (Geeky) Fun Facts About 2013 to Dazzle Your Friends With Tonight
Here are four facts about 2013 that you can memorize and use tonight to impress the friends, family, acquaintances, and/or possibly complete strangers with whom you’re planning to ring in the new year.
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5 Ways to Sneak Math Lessons into Baking Christmas Cookies
Recently, I’ve acquired a couple of elves to help me bake Christmas cookies. My sons, ages 7 and 10, are old enough to do just about everything in the cookie baking process (with plenty of adult supervision). My youngest son loves cracking eggs, which is just the beginning of the educational value of this annual tradition. I offer to you five small math lessons that can pay dividends for any young person to have a fruitful future in cooking and baking.
Continue ReadingNASA Johnson Style (Gangnam Style Parody)
I’ve seen a lot of cool things come out of NASA as they try to appeal to the next generation of scientists and engineers, but this is one of the best yet.
Continue ReadingNumbers League Dinosaurs and Critters: Kickstarting an Expansion
The folks at BentCastle Workshops made the game Numbers League a few years ago. (You can read my review here at GeekDad.) They even made it into an app, making it more portable than ever.
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week Answer: Gear Up
Piaget’s developmental stages should certainly include mention of the age at which kids learn to build with Lego gears. And then the next stage would be understanding them. This week’s puzzle required both.
Continue ReadingDon’t Miss Danica McKellar’s Latest Math Book, Girls Get Curves
Geometry was one of my favorite kinds of math. I loved learning how shapes worked, and even memorizing theorems and postulates. I especially enjoyed the challenge of doing geometric proofs. I looked at them like logic puzzles, forcing me to find a way from point A to point B using only the tools I knew up to that point. But I realize that I’m one of the lucky ones, girls who naturally like math, in and of itself. Not all girls are that lucky, however, and Danica McKellar writes books for those girls.
Continue ReadingDanica McKellar’s Girls Get Curves Makes Geometry Relevant
Ever since Danica McKellar, the actor (best known for playing Winnie in The Wonder Years) and UCLA-trained mathematician, began her New York Times-bestselling series of math books for girls in 2007, I’ve been curious to see what’s going on that’s …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week: Gear Up
I hope this is a fairly kid-friendly, hands-on challenge — perhaps even with the opportunity for a teachable moment or two. That said, if you don’t happen to have Lego gears lying around the house, feel free to illustrate, animate, …
Continue ReadingMaking Math Less Scary With Infographics
My kids have a strange aversion to numbers. Recently we’ve been using the trend of infographics to help them get their head around large numbers and make them less scary. By transforming those strings of digits into picture form they …
Continue ReadingA New Algebraic Math App: Polynomial Long Division
Adding to his extensive collection of simple but effective and clear math apps, Esa Helttula has now introduced Polynomial Long Division.
Continue ReadingDanica McKellar Interviewed on NPR’s Science Friday
Yesterday, geeky mom Danica McKellar was interviewed on NPR about her new book, Girls Get Curves: Geometry Takes Shape, her latest effort about teaching math to (especially) teenage girls. This book is geared toward, surprise, geometry.
Continue ReadingPensacola MESS Hall: A Hands-On Science Experiment Museum
My sons and I have already paid two visits to Pensacola, Florida’s newest science museum, the Pensacola MESS Hall. Where MESS = Math, Engineering, Science, and Stuff. My husband is now bugging us to go. At the MESS Hall, everything — and we mean EVERYTHING — is meant to be hands-on. There is guidance for math and science activities, but the kids drive it all. Yes, really. There is no wrong answer at the MESS Hall.
Continue ReadingGeekDad Community Discussion: Is Algebra Necessary?
The New York Times recently ran an opinion piece entitled Is Algebra Necessary? It questions whether schools focus too much on trying to teach a subject that causes many students to drop out of school entirely, with some schools seeing …
Continue ReadingFour Fun Math Apps
These games are so much fun my kids don’t even notice they’re strengthening their math skills.
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week Answer: Dog Siblings
I discovered yesterday that labradors don’t coexist peacefully with hook-wielding four-year-olds, and so I’m crossing the fishing beach off the list of 200 possible dog outings in Boulder, Colorado. In fact, I’m crossing it off with gusto. At least for …
Continue ReadingObese Kids Have Lower Math Scores
In June a study of 6,250 kids published in the journal Child Development found that obese children feel sadder, lonelier and more anxious and that these feelings largely explain obese children’s lower scores on math standardized tests. But the patterns …
Continue ReadingSmart Summer Fun: 30 Ideas For Your Geeklets
Keep brains active 30 ways this summer.
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week Answer: Poaching Berries
The berry bushes down the block are heavy with red, ripe raspberries. And so I believe it is my family’s duty to relieve the bushes of some of their burden, lest the weighty berries do long term damage to the …
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