Wild About Math! Making Math fun and accessible

Find me on LinkedIn

I'm about to make a big change in my life to have my work be aligned with my deep love of Math. Part of that change is going to be about having richer connections with other people who love Math. If you and I have made a nice connection through this blog and if you are a Math person, especially someone who is working to popularize Math, I'd love to be connected with you on LinkedIn. Just click on this link and request that I add you to my network. You can use the email sol dot lederman at gmail dot com. I find LinkedIn to be a great way to connect with people even when they move or change jobs so it's a great way to make connections and to keep them.

Oh, and I'm not closing down this blog.

13 surprising Fibonacci appearances

One of my great Math heroes, James Tanton, has written a great essay that provides thirteen examples of the Fibonacci sequence appearing in strange and unexpected places.

"I have YouTube videos presenting some surprising appearances of the Fibonacci numbers and I’ve been tweeting little puzzlers about the Fibonacci numbers for some time. Here, at long last, is my list of Fibonacci results, and a clever way to prove them all. Some of these puzzlers are classic, some are new to the world."

Mathematica pasta recipes

Even if you don't use Mathematica, you might enjoy this!

Tanton tantalizes with an Euler gem

James Tanton has produced another great video, this one on a very intriguing partitioning problem with a very clever solution.

There are four ways to break the number 6 down into a sum of distinct numbers: 6 = 5+1 = 4+2 = 3+2+1. There are four ways to break the number of 6 down into odd numbers: 5+1 = 3+3 = 3+1+1=1 = 1+1+1+1+1+1. It is no coincidence that the count of ways are the same. In 1740 Euler proved it will always be so! His proof is ingenious and here it is! I've also added a challenge at the end to discover other bizarre results like this one. (I bet you can do it!)

I thoroughly enjoy Tanton's ability to find interesting problems and make them accessible to those of us who aren't professional mathematicians. In fact, all of Tanton's videos are accessible to motivated high school students.

I was delighted to see Mr. Tanton included in Math Pickle's page of inspired people.

A MathPickle guy to the core - James Tanton is a fully fledged mathematician with a fantastic web site that offers videos for school teachers and first year university lecturers. Visit his web site here.

Geometry at the Royal Ballet

I received an email asking me to promote a ballet at the Royal Opera House that is rich in geometry. Here's the email.

Dear Sol,

The Royal Opera House is currently preparing to stage a triple bill ballet programme opening this Saturday, 28th May, featuring Frederick Ashton’s Scènes de ballet. This exceptional production introduces an intriguing complexity around geometrics with dancing movements creating a geometrical pattern.

We are very interested in attracting both old and new audiences, and particularly interesting is the geometricity of the ballet, which we would love audiences to experience.

We think this could be of an interest to your readers. You can find more information about the production on our website.

Would it be possible for us to leave a comment on your blog inviting audiences to these shows, or could you cover the upcoming production yourself?

Kind regards,

Anastasia

Calling all Math bloggers who tweet

[ Update 5/25/11 ] I've deleted the Mathtweet group for several reasons which I may or may not blog about sometime.

I notice that my new Playing With Mathematica blog gets a fair amount of traffic from twitter. I'd like more of that traffic so I've come up with an idea and a plan that will serve all of us.

How about if those of us who are Math bloggers tweet each other's blog articles? Friendfeed makes it easy to create a private (invitation only) group where we can post our latest Math blog articles so I've created such a group.

The commitment for anyone in the group is to tweet a large percentage (or all) of the links members post. If you don't like an article then don't tweet it. If you don't like most of what people post then this group isn't for you. While the commitment is for all of us to post to twitter, you are also welcome and encouraged to post to other social networks. Friendfeed is free (say that three times fast) and makes it very easy to post to a handful of social networks.

I'm the owner of the group so you need to email me at sol dot lederman at gmail dot com to receive an invitation. Please include your twitter id so that I can verify that you're active on twitter. If I don't know your blog then please send me a link to that as well so I can check it out. If your blog is heavy on commercial and light on content then I won't send you an invite. I want to have members with content that people feel good about promoting. And, if I discover that some members are receiving benefits but aren't tweeting very much then I'll drop them from the group.

Send me an email if you'd like an invite or if you have any questions.

Wolfram|Alpha turns 2

From the Wolfram Blog:

Celebrate Wolfram|Alpha Turning 2 with a Live Q&A with Stephen Wolfram

Another year has flown by here at Wolfram|Alpha, and the gears are really turning! New data and features are flowing at a rapid rate. To celebrate, Wolfram|Alpha’s creator, Stephen Wolfram, will share what we’ve been working on and take your questions in a live Q&A.

Please join us on Facebook or Wolfram|Alpha’s Livestream on Wednesday, May 18, 2011, at 10am PDT/12pm CDT/1pm EDT/6pm BST.

If you have a question you’d like to ask, please send it as a comment to this blog post or tweet to @Wolfram_Alpha and include the hashtag #WAChat. We’ll also be taking questions live on Facebook and Livestream chat during the webcast.

I’m famous!

The local Santa Fe newspaper ran an article about my monthly Math gatherings.

... I read about some guy who thought it was possible to make math "fun and accessible." He started a blog, Wild About Math!, and last fall he began hosting a math group the third Wednesday of each month at the Santa Fe Complex (a place where brainy people work with math to create some incredible, even useful, things).

Check it out!

Big Mangahigh announcement

[ Editor's note: Daniel Bauer from Mangahigh.com sent me the announcement below. Note that I have no experience with the site so I'm not endorsing it. But, I think it's worth spreading the word. ]

Hi Sol:

Wanted to share the following with you before we send out the official announcement March 30, 2011

Mangahigh.com, one of the world's first, web-based programs for K12 mathematics - is going to be announcing publicly on March 30, 2011 that all of our premium features are now available to all K12 schools completely free!

See details below - with budget concerns around the nation and education, we are thrilled to be able to offer the very first complete (content, games, analytics and more) math resource to schools without asking for one penny.

Mangahigh is Free NOW. Any School / Teacher can go to www.mangahigh.com and create their school account.

See details below; we hope that you will help us by getting the word out before our National Press Announcement on March 30, 2011. Please call me if you have any questions.

Regards,
Daniel

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Must-see TED glimpse at the future of education

This TED talk by Salman Khan totally blew me away. Check it out.