There are also some good examples of math in nature that could be illustrated such as Fibonacci spirals?
explain how encryption works. And why it’s so difficult to find the prime decomposition of some large numbers.
Explain that this is the basis for cryptocurrency and NFTs
For this purpose I want something that a non-mathy kid might look at and say, “hmm, that’s interesting”. I’m not sure catenary curves would pull that off.
Might be an interesting aside in a lesson at some point though.
That could work. I mentioned number theory being pretty useless until we needed to encrypt things. I might try to simplify that into a blurb.
Tell them the reason why most things are normally distributed is because of the central limit theorem - that the sum of stuff from any distribution will be normally distributed (bar some conditions).
It’s kinda like magic.
Fibonacci spirals in nature might be more eye-catching?
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Yeah, I like that idea
What about the old ‘if there are 23 people in a room, odds are >50% at least two people share a birthday?’
Is it 23? Whatever the number is.
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Basic geometry: I recall talking to the guy painting & hanging wallpaper at my mom’s house when I was student teaching and he walked me around the house to show me all of the different shapes whose area he had to be able to calculate to know how much wallpaper / paint to buy.
Rectangles, triangles, and even trapezoids! Guy recited the formula for area of a trapezoid before I could get a word in edgewise!
BTW, I’m a big fan of that formula. The area of a square, rectangle, parallelogram, rhombus, and even a triangle can be derived from the area of a trapezoid.
(A triangle is just a trapezoid where one of the parallel sides has a length of 0.)
Obligatory Simpsons vid:
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Oh, I posted earlier in another thread that a quick way to gauge the quality of a school district is to see who teaches 8th grade Honors Algebra I.
A quick way to just the quality of a math textbook is to look at that publisher’s geometry textbook and see whether they define a trapezoid as having “exactly” or “at least” one set of parallel sides. (You obviously want the latter as there’s no justification for restricting a trapezoid to “exactly”.)
So a square is a trapezoid? And a rectangle?
The Four Color Theorem is cool. Combinatorics in general is pretty cool too.
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Yes! Rhombuses and parallelograms too!
Simpson’s Paradox is always fun. And since the original had to do with college admissions, might play well to college-bound high schoolers.
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Med school graduates are assigned to their preferred locations as interns using the stable marriage theorem.
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