Wild About Math! Making Math fun and accessible

Carnival of Mathematics #66

Maxwell's Demon hosted Carnival of Mathematics #65. Here is #66.

If you're new to Carnival's or to this one, check out Mike Croucher's great introduction.

As is tradition, the Carnival host has to come up with interesting things to say about the number of the Carnival he or she is hosting. 66 factors into 2x3x11. Not very exciting, huh!?! Well, 66 is the number of 8-iamonds. This I learned from the "What's Special About this Number?" page. 66 is also a triangular palindromic number. And, there are 66 books in the bible. Thank you to this source for these last two facts. And, Star Trek's first year on TV was ... yup, 1966. Ok, time to get to the meat of the Carnival.

I’m hosting the June 4th Carnival of Mathematics

The title says it all. Please submit your entries here.

Carnival stuff

A couple of Carnival things:

1. The Carnival of Homeschooling came out a few days ago with two Math posts:

HappyCampers presents a delightful way to learn mathematics; Here's a fun group Math activity using the shoes on your feet! Happy Campers said, "We did this with our 4 & 5 year olds, but you could modify this activity for older children as well!" - Join in on the fun at the Wednesday CoOp posted at Reese's View Of The World.

Sol Lederman shows us great easy to learn games that kids and adults will really enjoy. All require only paper and pencil, so here's 8 really fun paper and pencil Math games posted at Wild About Math!.

2. The Carnival of Mathematics is coming up at Walking Randomly. Get those submissions in.

Carnival of Homeschooling includes a couple of Math posts

Denise and I had Math-related articles published in the latest Carnival of Homeschooling:

Denise offers middle school and high school students some Puzzles for the New Year, posted at her popular and useful blog Let’s play math!.

Sol reviews a math resource written by a homeschooling parent (one that I think I will check out, given the popularity of geometry around here): Math Mammoth Geometry 1 Elementary Math Workbook posted at Wild About Math!.

If you blog about Math subjects that homeschool parents or kids would appreciate this is a nice carnival to be a part of.

Carnivals and Miscellany

There are a number of items I want to write about but each one is not a post's worth so I'll just list them out Vlorbik-style.

The Carnival of Homeschooling #105 - 2nd anniversary edition is out. Here are the comments on the Math-related posts from the editor of that Carnival - not my words.

• Maria has some thoughts upon an article that compared Russian and American word math problems at Homeschool Math Blog. You can guess that the former were far more advanced than the latter.
• Sol of Wild About Math! has some nice Sudoku sites that are kid-friendly. He found some Free Sudoku resources. Sudoku is a great game to build logic skills and an interest in Math.
• Denise of Let’s play math! in Word problems in Russia and America also writes about Andrei Toom extended version of a talk he gave a few years ago at the Swedish Mathematical Society.

Someone submitted a post of mine about the connection between good storytelling ability and math skills to the Carnival of Storytelling #8. Very cool!

My friend Birney published a post I wrote specifically for his blog, Energy Boomer. Birney's blog is all about how to be conscious of energy use and how to save energy. The post is Drive or Bike: Do the Math. It's not the kind of Math I typically write about so go check it out.

The upcoming Carnival of Mathematics will be hosted next week at Ars Mathematica.

The 360 blog had a post on 12/24 about someone who has a dodecahedral calendar generator. It's very slick and very convenient given that a dodecahedron has 12 sides and a year has 12 months! You enter the year and select a language and the program generates a PDF file with the right shape pieces that you can fold together into a dodecahedron. So, if you don't already have a dodecahedral calendar for 2008 here's your chance to make your own!

The outstanding Spirit of Mathematics blog has a reference to this outstanding 11 page article by Paul Dawkins: How to Study Mathematics.

Carnival of Mathematics #23 posted

Brent has posted Carnival of Mathematics #23: Haiku Edition at The Math Less Traveled. This edition has 17 posts and Brent wrote a 17-syllable Haiku poem apropos to each post. Wow!

Check the Carnival of Mathematics page from time to time to see who's hosting next or see the end of Brent's Carnival post to learn how to submit your post or for information on contacting Alon about hosting the next Carnival or a later one.

Carnival of Mathematics #22

Welcome everybody to the 22nd Carnival of Mathematics!

This edition has 16 articles and 16 is my lucky number. Very cool!

If you find these Carnivals enjoyable please spread the word and help the blathosphere (Math+blogosphere=blathosphere - thanks Vlorbik for this reference to the term) grow by linking to this and every Carnival and by adding Math-related blogs to your blogroll. If you're not on my blogroll and your blog has predominantly Math-related content let me know and I'll add you.

Carnival of Homeschooling #102 announced

Seeking Rest in the Ancient Paths has posted the latest Carnival of Homeschooling. Here are the Math-related articles from the Carnival:

Mandy presents Fuzzy Math - Fuzzy Minds posted at Building Blocks.

Sol Lederman presents What kind of Math can you do with gum drops and tooth picks? posted at Wild About Math!.

Denise takes the thinking out of Math as she presents Math contest tip sheets posted at Let's play math!. She has handouts on tough topics for middle school students preparing for Math Counts or other competitions, plus links to many practice problems.

2nd call for Carnival of Mathematics articles

I'm hosting the upcoming Carnival of Mathematics. I need submissions by Thursday night and will release the Carnival sometime Friday.

For those of you who are not familiar with blog carnivals, they're "events" in which the carnival host publishes submissions he/she deems appropriate to the theme of the carnival. This carnival is about mathematics and I'll accept pretty much any submission (blog post) related to Math. Submitting to the carnival is a nice way to get some traffic to your blog and potentially more readers. See the Carnival of Mathematics homepage for links to past carnivals for some ideas on what kinds of articles get published.

So far I've gotten submissions from Mark Dominus, Graeme Taylor, Andree, Aaron Roth, Larry Ferlazzo, Kalid Azad, and Rich Cochrane.

Please submit your blog post through the official submission form.

Thank you.

Carnival of Homeschooling features four Math articles

Carnival of Homeschooling #101 is out at Dewey's Treehouse. This is one of my very favorite carnivals as it's always really well done.

Four Math articles were featured and these descriptions were copied from the Carnival page:

1. Let's play math presents Fraction models, and a card game

2. Mandy presents Teaching Math Using Exercise posted at Building Blocks Blog.

3. The Homeschool Math Blog presents Pan Balance Problems to Teach Algebraic Reasoning. "This post includes a FREE gift: download a whole lesson from my upcoming book of some pan balance (or scales) problems where children solve for the unknown."

4. Wild About Math! presents Mathcast #2: Quick multiplication of two 2-digit numbers.