Wild About Math! Making Math fun and accessible

Wild About Math blogs 5/6/11

Hello, everyone! Here's this week's blog roundup.

My new blog, Playing With Mathematica, is doing well. In only a week the blog has gotten 45 subscribers and 1,000 page views. Plus, I've been getting a good number of comments and participation from Mathematica wizards. There are three interactive notebooks on the site. My aim is to have two new notebooks each week. Come check it out.

Oxford University Press sent me a review copy of the revised and updated edition of their book, The Number Sense, by Stanislas Dehaene.

Our understanding of how the human brain performs mathematical calculations is far from complete, but in recent years there have been many exciting breakthroughs by scientists all over the world. Now, in The Number Sense, Stanislas Dehaene offers a fascinating look at this recent research, in an enlightening exploration of the mathematical mind. Dehaene begins with the eye-opening discovery that animals--including rats, pigeons, raccoons, and chimpanzees--can perform simple mathematical calculations, and that human infants also have a rudimentary number sense. Dehaene suggests that this rudimentary number sense is as basic to the way the brain understands the world as our perception of color or of objects in space, and, like these other abilities, our number sense is wired into the brain.

I've not had a chance to read it but I see that the old edition has a number of reviews on Amazon and almost every single one is four or five stars. (The updated edition is too new to have many reviews.)

Sue at Math Mama Writes introduces www.pmathpickle.com a web-site that I'm thrilled to learn about. What I particularly like about the site is that it includes open-ended Math problems that kids can relate to and professional mathematics can try to crack. I'll use some of the activities at my Math gatherings where I make it a point to only explore ideas that kids and adults together in the same room can enjoy. Read Sue's article for a link to the archive of an interview with the creator of the site.

Gary Davis at Republic of Mathematics has a nice exploration into the distribution of 0's in powers of 2. There are some nice-looking Mathematica graphs in the article.

Dan at Math4love writes about an amazing little subtraction game that little kids can play and enjoy and that adults can too.

Here is a phenomenal lesson, accessible to any child who knows how to subtract, and compelling to everyone, up to and including professional mathematicians. Get a kid engaged in it, and they’ll do hundreds of subtraction problems without complaint, because it’s helping them solve an honest mathematical mystery.

Patrick at Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks shares some of his favorite Math Counts problems. Some of them are quite challenging, and they're for middle school students.

The Journal of Marketing Research has a very interesting article about the influence of numbers in the names of products being marketed.

A series of experiments documents the influence of numbers on the liking of brands. For example, an imaginary brand name for anti-dandruff shampoo (Zinc) is more liked when it includes a common product number (e.g., Zinc 24) than when with includes a prime number (e.g., Zinc 31). The research also shows that the presence of the operands responsible for the sum or product further enhance the liking of a brand name. For example, not only is a Volvo S12 more liked than a Volvo S29, but liking is further enhanced when an advertisement for a Volvo S12 includes a license plate with the numbers 2 and 6. The operands 2 and 6 make 12 more familiar because they encourage the subconscious generation of the number 12.

Hat tip to Pat.

Finally, for your video entertainment, here's a great video of all sorts of interesting mathematical objects, some of which seem easy to make.

Hat tip to Xah Lee.