by MathPickle | Oct 12, 2015 |
There is one great minaret at Samarra, but what happened if Caliph al-Mutawakkil decided to build twelve!?! The Caliph loved beautiful geometry, so if he had built twelve minarets, he might have chosen to build them in an array with 90 degree rotational...
by MathPickle | Oct 12, 2015 |
A set of plastic circle fractions got me thinking. How many ways can a circle be constructed if your smallest piece is 1/6? If your smallest piece is 1/6, there are six ways to complete the circle. Here we see the front and back view of one proposed solution. Is it...
by MathPickle | Sep 19, 2015 |
Zome Zome is a manipulative that is excellent for the upper grades – however it takes time to put away and is fragile. Nevertheless, there is no manipulative so versatile on the market, so it should be considered. I am now equally in favour (especially for...
by MathPickle | Sep 19, 2015 |
64 = 65 Mathemagical Proof (Martin Gardner) Get your older students to break apart a convincing mathemagical trick by linking it to the Fibonacci sequence and calculating the slopes of some line segments. Younger students derive a lot of pleasure by figuring out that...
by MathPickle | Sep 19, 2015 |
Taxi Cab Squares (inspired by the Inscribed square problem of Otto Toeplitz, 1911) Give your students practice with Cartesian coordinates as they explore a new variant of a famous, unsolved problem of Otto Toeplitz (1911). This problem has a very wide spectrum of...
