Nobel Prize goes to THE HEXAGON (and some persistent scientists)

"Neuroscience: Brains of Norway : Nature News & Comment." 7 Oct. 2014 <http://www.nature.com/news/neuroscience-brains-of-norway-1.16079>

Edvard and May-Britt Moser have been working together for 30 years. For 28 of those years they have also been married. 

These two scientists embody the learner profiles and show us how persistence, resilience and problem solving can lead to success. Not only that but mistakes along the way helped them to unravel the mystery of how our brains map out our environments. People are now calling it the GPS of our brains.

They have won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, with neuroscientist John O’Keefe at University College London (their former supervisor).

There is no Nobel Prize for Maths as we have discussed in class, but the mathematics is everywhere. Here in our brains wonderful hexagons form the way we sense location.

Please read more about it in the Scientific American and in Nature Magazine. Very exciting brain research! 

LIVE SHARING - LIGHTNING STRIKES

COOL! GET IN
ENJOY

HERE

The Weather and its Patterns can be COOL

Below is an animated gif of winds around the Earth.
Check out the key below for deeper understanding of what you are looking at.

Source: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data/model-datasets/reanalysis

A 3-D animated image of Reanalysis-2 data for the first ten days of July 1979, in six-hourly intervals. This animation shows a constant 100mph wind speed surface in red. (Note the stronger, more widespread, polar jet stream in the southern hemisphere--this is July, during the southern winter.) A cyan-colored, constant temperature sheet of zero degrees Celsius ripples across the globe, showing the freezing level. Near-surface wind flow is denoted by white flowlines. This image was generated with plots from Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) combined with ImageMagick.

Mean Sea Surface Temperatures

Source: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data/model-datasets/sea-surface-temperatures-sst-and-winds

A plot of global, monthly mean wind speeds and directions for September 1990. These data are from the Blended Sea Winds dataset, available through NOMADS. This image was produced with NASA’s Panoply visualization tool.

Here is a cool gif relating to what we are investigating in science and mathematics in MYP2
source: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/High_School_Earth_Science/Climate_and_Its_Causes

How to see when you forget your glasses

or how we see things... from Minute Physics.

For Tenzin and others who love the oceans and seas

From I Love Charts, yes that is a site that I do enjoy

Synchronisation or Synchronization depending on your point of view, it's all pretty cool

Lots of people are posting a video about a murmuration of starlings on social networks. I came across this video and others many years ago and I wish to see it at a large scale one day.

For more collective noun names for animals that are as cool as a murmuration of starlings and a murder of crows check this out. It's about naming a group of animals, so technically they are mathematical terms. You can't be a called a group without counting to check if there are more than one of something present.

What's your favourite?
Do you do the same thing in your mother tongue?



On the TEDtalk page of our mathematics blog is a video about synchronisation in every day occurrences. I think you will enjoy it.  Steven Stogatz and his talk on "How things in nature tend to sync up" should be at the top of the blog page.

IFLScience‏@IFLScience

If you track the relative positions of Earth and Venus over an 8 year period, this is the resulting pattern. pic.twitter.com/oRbXDxVVIB

from the wonderful sharing world of Twitter

Nature's Shape - is it the HEXAGON?

In MYP2 on Loy Krathong day at school we had another look at nature's shape by watching another cool video from The Code from the BBC.

So many great questions come from this video.

Oh, we also learnt that waveboarders go beyond the normal times tables. Waveboarders know their 180 times tables because of the turns they make/take on their boards.  Very cool!

What is Nature's Shape? Does it have a shape? What's your favourite Shape? Do circles make you happy?

In MYP2 we are looking at patterns, and how to communicate what we see using the language of mathematics. This then becomes something we can use to make predictions.

Our Unit Question is "What is nature's shape?" Do you know?

Here is one of my favourite patterns and some of my favourite Mathematics.

Some of my students said "no! anything but Fibonacci" when I first mentioned patterns this year.  That made my mathematical heart and soul ache with sadness for my students. There is so much incredible beauty in nature that can be communicated by the incredible versatility of Mathematics.

I hope this helps to spread the joy and curiosity


Here is the Vimeo Channel of their work.

And if you'd like to get deeper into how they made the video (using gorgeous mathematics) please check out the blog that goes with this video right here.

The Beauty Of Mathematics - A Video

Humans Will Be Outnumbered By Lego Minifigures

Today we feature some cool maths sent to us from Ajarn Jon.

There is so much mathematics in the world of humanities and here is a cool graph of humans and lego humans.

By 2019, Humans Will Be Outnumbered By Lego Minifigs - Gizmodo

From Gizmodo, where Ajarn Jon found this (it looks like it may have originated from XKCD):

Since their introduction in 1978, Lego's Minifigs have, um, reproduced at a rapid rate. In fact, the toymaker has been making the little fellas at such a pace that they'll outnumber humans by 2019.
As of 2006, there were 4 billion Minifigs in the world; projecting forward both human and Lego populations suggests that tiny plastic men will outnumber us by 2019. Imagine that: a world where there are more Minifigs than fellow homosapiens. That's our kind of world. [XKCD]

WOW - Chris Jordan's Running the Numbers art project

This is fantastic.

What a wonderful way to visualise the scale of things.

Please click on the link and enjoy.
Click once on each picture and watch as it either zooms in or out.

From Triangular Worms to Strandbeesties

Check out these mathematical creatures that live on beaches. We started watching in MYP2 today, but I think students young and old (including teachers and parents) will be amazed.

Don't forget there are many subtitles you can choose from...

Bubble Artist - it's a real job

"The sphere is nature's most efficient shape"

In MYP2 we are asking ourselves "What is nature's shape?". We stopped to look at the sphere from the BBC series called The Code.

Ajarn Hugo shared some very cool stuff that has lots of mathematics to make it so...

please enjoy and click on the link Wave Garden

4 of 4 Surfer Quaid Birchell of Morrow Bay CA by Mike Baird
licensed under CC by A