Wild About Math! Making Math fun and accessible

Wild About Math blogs 5/27/11

Welcome to Wild About Math blogs!

This is the last edition. If you'd like to put on your own personal Math blog carnival I recommend you follow the large list of blogs at Mathblogging.org and let us all know about the articles you like. I thought I had a pretty big list of Math blogs in my RSS reader; their list is much bigger. You can subscribe to parts or to all of their list via RSS and you can even follow the twitter feeds of a bunch of Math bloggers.

I discovered some really wonderful BBC Math radio shows. See here.

Math Teachers at Play Carnival #38 is up at Mathematics and Multimedia.

I've been spending time at the Math Pickle site, greatly enjoying the simple yet deep and difficult to solve Math puzzles and games there. The "inspired people" page is particularly noteworthy. There are some familiar faces on the page, Martin Gardner, Vi Hart, and James Tanton to name a few. And, there are a bunch of people I don't know much about who I'll have to read up on. Here's one inspired person from the list:

Leo Moser seems to have been the first person who advocated unsolved problems being used in K-12 education. He asked many tough problems with child-like zeal: “What’s the area of the smallest house that a unit worm can live comfortably?” meaning what shape can cover a worm no matter how he curls up?

And, also from the Math Pickle site, is a video of a fun division game with some deep stuff going on beneath the surface.

MAA NumberADay has an interesting bit of number theory:

The product of the four primes in a prime quadruplet (except for 5, 7, 11, 13) always ends in 189. Example: 101 x 103 x 107 x 109 = 121,330,189.

I was curious about why this should be and I got this hint from Wikipedia:

All prime quadruplets except {5, 7, 11, 13} are of the form {30n + 11, 30n + 13, 30n + 17, 30n + 19} for some integer n. (This structure is necessary to ensure that none of the four primes is divisible by 2, 3 or 5).

Do you see why the product should end in 189 (except for the first set)?

Sue at Math Math Writes has a challenging Math problem from "Rediscovering Mathematics, by Shai Simonson."

Finally, here's a fun number line cartoon from xkcd.

Hat tip to Ars Mathematica.