Making Math More Interesting

Example

Wrinkles by the Numbers

Wrinkles

Here's an article that discusses how wrinkles can be predicted and formed based on mathematical principles. See "A grand theory of wrinkles" in Quanta.

Under pressure, curved surfaces transition from a regular, dimpled pattern to one with irregular wrinkles. NORBERT STOOP in Quanta.

Translating Triangles With Quilts: Janet's Quilts

Translation Please...

This is a cool quilt inspired by the quilter's son's geometry class.

Here's the original post: Material Maven's Blogspot

Winter Olympics

Olympics Math
The Winter Olympiad continues in Vancouver, Canada. Sports is always a great tool to get kids interested in math, and to provide them with real world applications for mathematical thinking and processes.

Some excellent tools to use follow:

Winter Olympics Graphing


Erica Loop's blog provides a good outline to get kids to create bar graphs, histograms, and other visual representations of Olympic results.

Use the Vancouver Olympics' web-site for data.

For example, here's the Olympics medal count as of today:

Welcome

Woo-hoo!
Welcome to the MathOughts blog, which is designed to be a platform to share thoughts and information about math.

As a second career middle- and secondary- school math teacher, I'm constantly looking for new ways to make math relevant to my students, and to entertain and educate them -- as well as myself.

My hope is to gather information, and post it in the form of an open working bibliography of information, thoughts, questions and what-nots.

So join me on my journey of exploration, and pitch in, help, cajole, refine or just plain heckle...

Oh, one more thing: let's remember that learning and teaching math ought to be fun!