If you had a friend taking this class next year, what advice would you give them?
September 8, 2016, 12:00 amI asked the above question, If you had a friend taking this class next year, what advice would you give them?, to the outgoing PreCalculus H group last year. I’m giving the incoming PreCalculus H their responses. Here’s a link to all the responses, and here are some of the absolute jewels. (No e...
Workflow: Desmos -> Processing -> Fiji -> 3D Print
July 8, 2016, 12:00 amNote: this post is a more advanced version of the previous post and uses slightly different software. All this software is free and open-source.
In this post I’m going to outline how to use a workflow to go from a desmos sketch to a processing sketch to Fiji to a 3D file. The basic idea of...
Workflow: Daily Desmos -> Desmos -> Madeup -> 3D Print
June 13, 2016, 12:00 amThe seniors don’t go to school on the last day, so I had calculus class on Friday with one student (a junior). We went down to the innovations lab to create things. Here’s what we worked on:
Took this sketch from dailydesmos:
I had the student work on the solution after talking about superell...
Thoughts on the Intersection of Math and Programming
June 13, 2016, 12:00 amI’ve been interested in the intersection between Math and Programming ever since I taught my first programming course 12 years ago (call it coding, CS, whatever you’d like). I think I’m finally starting to figure it out. Maybe. I was prodded by Dan Meyer and Julia Tsygan to think more in detail abou...
What to do post AP/IB exam?
May 1, 2016, 12:00 amWith the IB exams coming up soon, I’ve started to put more thought into what we should do after the exams (we’ll have 8 blocks or so). For the past three years we did free-form math projects and last year they even wrote up great blog posts about their projects. But due to less time left (we used...
The Mango Gates – Puzzler
February 14, 2016, 12:00 amFrom Car Talk:
RAY: This Puzzler came from Kevin Tobin. A maharajah owned a mango tree that had very sweet, abundant fruit. People would come from miles around to pick the fruit. So the maharajah decided to protect the tree by erecting a series of seven concentric fences around it. Each fence had...
3d Representation of Dog Chase
November 13, 2015, 12:00 amNot what it sounds like.
The four dog problem from Steve Strogatz:
N dogs start in the corners of a regular N-gon. Each runs directly toward the dog on its left. How far do they run before colliding?
— Steven Strogatz (@stevenstrogatz) October 27, 2015
The Last Seat : Car Talk Puzzler
November 9, 2015, 12:00 amYet another great car talk puzzler, The Last Seat:
RAY: You’re one of a hundred people standing in line to get onto an airplane that has 100 seats. There’s a seat for every person who’s in line, and each of you has a boarding pass for your assigned a seat. The first person to walk onto the pla...
Linear Functions, Cardiods, and the Mandelbrot Set
November 9, 2015, 12:00 amThis tweet was retweeted by Steve Strogatz:
@stevenstrogatz great @Mathologer video on the cardioid and its family: https://t.co/ElDxW67N3X
— Anna Lukács (@launknaacs) November 6, 2015
What a great video, linking linear functions, cardiods, and the family of Mandelbrot sets. Rang m...
Visualization of a Function Through Time
October 15, 2015, 12:00 am(This post demonstrates the math behind the creation of some unusual math art. I got the idea from this tumblr post which I don’t even think works like this. But it was the inspiration behind the pictures.)
Take this function: f(x) = x^2 + a*cos(ax). When you take values of a between 0 and 8...