I have no idea why I picked this blog name, but there's no turning back now
I started a new math art project today and just couldn’t stop. Basically I’m dreading going back to school soon, but didn’t want to mope all day and waste it. So the day turned into a day of learning new things. Right now my project is drying so I don’t have a final photo yet. […]
Ages ago, I kickstarted the “hypnograph” which is a cycloid drawing machine. I tried to get it to work when it arrived, but for some reason, I couldn’t get the drawings to work out. (The instructions that it came with were okay but there were bits that could have been much clearer.) However I found […]
I’m going to be teaching a mini-course (7 days) on math-art in this upcoming school year. In my work on that course this summer, I started thinking about how I can have kids work with embroidery hoops and floss. And unrelated, this morning, I was thinking about a quilt my high school friend made for […]
A friend found this Sangaku, which if you don’t know (from Wikipedia) are Japanese geometrical problems or theorems on wooden tablets which were placed as offerings at Shinto shrines or Buddhist temples during the Edo period by members of all social classes. So here’s what she sent me (from here) The question that I’m attempting to figure out is: what is the radius […]
I did a 4-week math teacher professional development this summer: 21st Century Math 2025. I participated in it also in 2023, its first year, and really loved it. I highly recommend it for math teachers who love math, but haven’t played around with math puzzles or exploring novel mathematics themselves in a while. As Fawn […]
Like in my last post, I want to share a math problem I was working on for a summer professional development I’m doing. This was part of the problem set that the PD organizer Justin Lanier wrote up. The problem is outlined here: As part of this professional development, we started filling in a spreadsheet […]
This is going to be a writeup for a math problem I’ve been working on for a professional development thing I’m doing this summer. The question related to soap bubbles. Because I just want to get something up, for now I’m going to quickly say that the problem I’ve been tackling reduces to this: Let’s […]
In my last post, I shared a question posed to me by a student. Essentially, it boiled down to: can we algebraically prove that the following will always be an integer? I shared it with two friends in my department because they both really love combinatorics like me. One gave me some really nice ways […]
Today in class, a student asked a question that stumped me. I haven’t yet given myself a lot of time to think about it, but I went into the city after school for something and on the subway ride home I had my audiobook on and I basically didn’t “hear” anything because my mind kept […]
On Thursday, after school, I hopped in an Uber to the airport. I was flying to a conference, the “Teaching Contemporary Mathematics” conference (TCM) held at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. I think I’ve been at least twice over my career, maybe three times, and always found it to be a really […]
I had a thought that just occurred to me and I wanted to archive it before I forgot it. I’ll probably forget that it is even here at all, and nothing will come of it, but I had a thought about developing a new one-semester course for juniors and seniors at my school. It would […]
For a month this summer, I paid $30 to get an Alamo Drafthouse Movie Pass. Alamo is a movie theater that allow serves food and drinks. What the Movie Pass allows you to do is watch a movie every day (and you only pay a $1.89 service fee). It is summer and I figured why […]
Throughout the month of July 2023, I participated in a PD experience that was unique to me. Justin Lanier, a former math teacher turned professional mathematician, held a PD he developed called “21st Century Mathematics” and the ultimate goal was “To grow as mathematicians, both for our own enjoyment and for the benefit of our […]
This is a continuation of the previous post. My goal here is to connect this up to calculus. Below is a graph of stitches I need to make to create any given row. So for example in Row 16 and Row 17, I have to make 45 stitches. So to find the total number of […]
Last summer, my friend and math teacher extraordinaire Peg Cagle started teaching me to knit. It’s been wonderful — something I can do while listening to audiobooks. I’ve been trying to push myself a little bit each time I pick a new project [1]. I’m now working on something called the Boneyard Shawl by Stephen […]