Wild About Math! Making Math fun and accessible

More fun with the number 11

In honor of 11/22/11 (22 = 11+11), here is a nice complement to my 11/11/11 post.

Happy 11/11/11 Day!

With help from a number of you I produced a screencast and blog article of fun math stuff for 11/11/11.

Read my blog article at the Wolfram Blog.

Math is purest :)

Ma & Pa Kettle Math

An incredible magic square

From Grey Matters:

In the following video from Germany, performer Robin Wersig asks for a 3-digit number, getting 843 as a reply, and then asks for a starting square, for which D2 is given. He then proceeds to start at square D2, and creates an 8 by 8 magic square totaling 843 in every row and column, all while performing a Knight's Tour!

The importance of learning those formulas!

From XKCD:

An evil twist on an old idea

From OhGizmo!

This gadget is pretty evil. It's an alarm clock that won't turn off until you solve an arithmetic problem. If you're not awake enough some morning to disarm the alarm, take solace in this quote from the OhGizmo! article:

... I wouldn’t actually worry about it becoming too annoying since I’m sure it will work with that age old equation; alarm clock + wall = silence.

A fun moving cube kids can make

Here's a great craft project for kids to make using wooden cubes and duct tape. An adult will need to help with the cutting of the image to place on the cubes. I think it would be extra fun to design two images that work in such a way that you see one or the other depending on which way the cubes turn.

Hat tip to Richard Wiseman.

What do you get when you cross a manual typewriter with an iPad?

[ Ok, so this post is way off topic. Fortunately, it's my blog. ]

I grew up with an Underwood manual typewriter. If I only still had that typewriter I could hook it up to any USB-capable computer. USBTypewriter.com provides design documents, assembly instructions, kits to do it yourself, and you can ship them your typewriter and they'll install the mod for you. Wow!

Hat tip to NspireD2.

Sneaking Math into children’s diets

[ Editor's note: This is a guest post by Caroline Mukisa, who took me up on my offer to promote web-sites that are non-commercial (or that are slightly commercial but have tons of great free content. ]

Caroline Mukisa is on a mission to help parents to support their childrens Math learning and is a big fan of sneaking math into children's (and parent's) diets. She blogs as the Maths Insider.

This blog post is the culmination of a fight; a really big fight. You see when Sol invited me to guest post on Wild About Math! I took it as an opportunity to seize possession of the big, shiny, blue book my 10 year old had kept hidden away for the past 6 months so that she wouldn't have to share it with her brother, The Guinness Book of World Records.

Following the liberation of the big, shiny, blue book, her brother wasn't going to just let me take it and read it for research purposes, he wanted it and he wasn't giving up without a fight. He even brought in reinforcements, his 2 little brothers. Guinness World Records 2010, you see, still has thousands of extreme facts but also has thousands of photos of the biggest, fastest, smallest, loudest and more, so even my pre-numerate 18 month old wanted to take a look.