The Bubble Sort and Shell Sort algorithms are demonstrated. Wow!


Credits from the video: 

Created at Sapientia University, Tirgu Mures (Marosvásárhely), Romania.Directed by Kátai Zoltán and Tóth László. In cooperation with “Maros Művészegyüttes”, Tirgu Mures (Marosvásárhely), Romania.Choreographer: Füzesi Albert. Video: Lőrinc Lajos, Körmöcki Zoltán. Supported by “Szülőföld Alap”, MITIS (NGO) and evoline company.

Wow! This book claims to show 8 ways to knit a Sierpinski’s Triangle!

Crafting by Concepts: Fiber Arts and Mathematics

by sarah-marie belcastro and Carolyn Yackel (editors).

The MAA now hosts a Pi Day webpage: http://maa.org/piday/
This is a must-visit site for next year’s Pi Day.
How did you celebrate Pi Day?

I just got word from Tom Mullen, the AP at East Side Community High School, that the roundtables are back! Here’s the link to sign up:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dFRqbzFTZzI5OWtGeGY1eDFlN0NqQWc6MA

Clicking on the above link brings you to the description and schedule below. I’ve been attending the round tables for several years, and they are definitely worth attending.

East Side Community School’s January 2011 Roundtable Presentations

I just heard from Steve Maurer, the academic director of MathPath, a summer math program for middle school students. His program has run since 2002, and the math instructors are something of a dream team, featuring some famous mathematical names such as John Horton Conway (well-known genius mathematician), Titu Andreescu (who runs the American Math Competitions) and Sam Vandervelde (author of Circle in a Box).

This program seems ideal for middle school students who are already budding mathematicians. They’ve previously recruited students who have done well at math competitions, but are now making a concerted effort to reach out to math circle participants who are motivated by the excitement of mathematics itself. I hope this new effort succeeds! Teachers and math circle organizers: please send some great students towards MathPath!

Another really interesting summer math program for middle school students that I’m in contact with is brand new this year, the Summer Program in Mathematical Problem Solving (SPMPS). This program also has ties to the high school level Canada USA Mathcamp (http://www.mathcamp.org/) but its target audience is quite different: underserved New York City middle school students with talent in math. One goal is to set these students on their own math path and to open up access for them to the wealth of high school math programs enjoyed by students at more privileged schools. I wonder how many mathematicians will eventually come out of SPMPS?

I’ve been helping the director of SPMPS, Dan Zaharopol, to network with underserved middle schools in  NYC, and he’s off to an exciting start. Dan has sponsorship from the Art of Problem Solving Foundation to start his program at Bard College this summer. It promises to be a great program, and I wish him luck!

Summer Program in Mathematical Problem Solving
UR: http://www.artofproblemsolving.org/spmps/
Dates: Monday, July 11 to Monday, August 1
Location: Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

I just noticed that Wikibooks features a decent LaTeX reference: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX

This is my newest problem, to appear in the October 2010 issue of La Voz.

What is this picture asking? Ben suggested that instead of bold black squares, I should have indicated the squares with something especially significant to grasshoppers. Something tasty or something dangerous?

Where did this come from? This problem is related to a derivation of the formula for Primitive Pythagorean Triples: Find all relatively prime natural number triples (a,b,c) that satisfy the equation

The first step in my favorite elementary number theory proof is to show that not both a and b are odd. This would imply that c is one of the shaded squares above: 2, 6, 10, 14, …

Does the grasshopper land on a (boxed) square?

I’m helping the Bard Math Circle start up math circle activities in the Kingston Library.

I’ve slowly been entering the world of math blogging, first by reading blogs, and now by posting a note occasionally on this blog. There is an amazing world of math bloggers out there, some I’m proud to know in person, and so many worth reading.

Here’s a post claiming to be the top 25 classroom math bloggers: http://www.onlinedegrees.org/top-25-blogs-for-math-in-the-classroom/, which may be the best list to get started. Give it a read!