News: Thoughts about maths thinking
Does it matter that roosters don't lay eggs?
There is a particularly annoying puzzle that goes something like this:
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Moses loved numbers
Many traditions hold that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. If we assume this is true, then there is one thing I think is clear about Moses, based on the things he wrote: he loved numbers. I'm pretty sure he was a mathematician at heart, or at the very least an accountant, because his books are littered with numbers which are not entirely necessary to get his overall point across.
Forget pi, it's cos squared that's wrong!
For a while now, a debate has been raging about whether we should scrap using pi in all our equations and instead write everything in terms of tau (which is 2 pi). Most of the time I stand at a distance from this debate, thinking it rather tedious and preferring instead to fun things with pi like draw its digits in chalk on the footpath. But every so often I get involved.
Beware of the Toast
There is a little trick someone played on me once as a child and I have been playing on the students in the Drop-In room this week. It goes like this:
Who tells you if you're correct?
At our uni, the first year maths students do the majority of their assignments online using MapleTA, and this week MapleTA was having problems. As always happens with technology glitches, it was an absolute schemozzle. It was bad enough for students that it was intermitently not working at all, but what made it worse was that even when it was working, the "preview" and "how did I do" functions were both failing. This meant that students could not use the computer to check if they were right, and a lot of them were extremely distressed by this.
Mathematical collocations
There is a phrase people use when talking about statistics that really bugs me. It's "non-parametric data". I see it all the time in statistical teaching materials and I hate it because I know what they mean, but what they've said is simply wrong. Whoever writes this phrase has a tenuous grasp of what the word non-parametric means. If they really understood what it meant, they would realise that the word non-parametric can only be used to apply to a statistical procedure, not to the data itself; the words "non-parametric" and "data" just can't be put together like that.
The Pied Mathematician of Hamelin
Have you ever been in a situation and felt like you were reliving a scene from a book or movie? Well it happened to me the other day when I went to visit my daughter's school. I felt exactly like I was the piper in the Pied Piper of Hamelin, because an ever-growing crowd of children followed me across the oval as I walked in.
The shoemaker and Dobby
Do you know the story of the Shoemaker and the Elves? Well, I've known it since I was very young. It's a Brothers Grimm, and it goes something like this:
Rule collision
The same experience has happened to me several times in the Maths Drop-In Centre recently – with different students from different courses – and it was such a strong pattern I need to talk about it.
The students are doing some algebra involving negative powers on the tops of fractions. Something like this:
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