Category Archives: Mathematics

Schöne Links beim Schockwellenreiter klauen

Jörg hat heute gleich mehrere Links, die es sich lohnen zu klauen:

MathPuzzle.com, the puzzling weblog of recreational mathematics offers Sam Loyd‘s Cyclopedia of Puzzles or Sam Loyd’s Cyclopedia of 5000 Puzzles, Tricks, and Conundrums (With Answers) – among many other things worth checking out! (Beim Schockwellenreiter hier gefunden.)

Und:

“Für die kleine Formal zwischen durch ist die Freeware PDF Equatation sehr hilfreich. Sie bietet ein Eingabefenster, in dem schnell die LaTeX-Befehle für eine Formel eingegeben werden können. Das Programm erstellt dann eine PDF-Datei, die sich in den meisten Text verarbeitenden Programmen unter OS X als Grafik weiter verwenden läßt.” (Quelle)

Escher again!

While searching for a certain Escher tessellation on the web I stumbled upon two great sites about M. C. Escher’s artwork and its use in the classroom:

The Mathematics behind the Art of M. C. Escher:

“As Escher’s works cover many areas from perspective distortions to metamorphoses, as such we felt that to talk a little about everything would have been explaining too little of too many things. As such, we have singled in onto one particular type of his work, tessellations.
In addition, the team felt that it we wanted to keep our explanations simple and clear, as such the extensive use of Flash animation is was chosen as the medium to relay our thoughts.
We hope to achieve through this paper:

  • a deeper understanding and appreciation of Escher’s tessellations
  • to uncover the underlying mathematical principles behind his artwork
  • based on principles that we have learned, we will also attempt to create some original tessellations of our own
  • lastly, to explore the possibilities of his artwork in practical usage in areas of architecture such as space, form and façade treatment.”

Jill Britton: Escher in the Classroom.
This is “a condensation of the article written by Jill Britton for M.C. Escher’s Legacy: A Centennial Celebration – the proceedings of the International Escher Congress held in Rome, Italy in July 1998″.

Britton also mainains a page of activity links about symmetry and tessellations.

The Socratic Method

The Socratic Method: Teaching [binary arithmetic] by asking instead of by telling by Rick Garlikov.

“The following is a transcript of a teaching experiment, using the Socratic method, with a regular third grade class in a suburban elementary school. I present my perspective and views on the session, and on the Socratic method as a teaching tool, following the transcript.”

This was only one of several excellent links I found at Ask MetaFilter: Numbers are fun!. The question was about “examples of number systems not based on western sets of 10. Anyone know of good info on non-standard number systems used in other cultures or for niche purposes, such as hexadecimal?”

Another fun web page is The Pi Code: “a base-26 system (the letters of the alphabet, with a=0) [is used] to write out Pi and then the string [is searched] for the appearances of English words.”

Recreational Mathematics

I like like the section title recreational mathematics from MathWorld, it sounds almost like recreational drugs, as if some people get high by doing mathematics. Which I guess some people do…

Ahem, back to the link that I meant to post: animated GIFs is a collection of interactive entries in this section. It includes some well-known things like the cardioid, the cycloid, the epicycloid, and the Möbius strip, as well as my favourite geometry, the Poincaré hyperbolic disk, and also some lesser-known ones like the Steiner chain, or Langton’s ant, or the coin paradox (which I incidentally used at school this very morning).

Link via Ralf by e-mail.