Number Sense - Thanks Ajarn Dale

Hey there maths fans!

Ajarn Dale sent on some cool "Math Tricks". Some people think that these tricks are cheating, but in actual fact it's about understanding numbers and being able to make them work for YOU.

Check them out here in wisebread.com - thanks Ajarn Dale.
11 useful math tricks

Numbers in a City: New Haven / 1997 / SML by See-ming Lee licensed under CC by A SA

Maryam Mirzakhani - my new hero

This is a wonderful article about Maryam Mirzakhani, the first female recipient of the Fields Medal. Thanks to Ajarn Krysten for sharing this with me.

She used to think she couldn't do mathematics. Everyone can do mathematics.

Read it here and watch the video.

Interested in non-standard surfaces? Check out this TEDTalk on crocheting a life size coral reef.

Perseids Meteor Shower Peak soon - pretty skies

12-13 - Perseids Meteor Shower Peak - These meteors are leftovers from Swift-Tuttle comet and are a favorite among many skywatchers.
We missed the big show but the Super Moon would have made it tricky to see anyway. 

The shower can be visible from July 17th through August 24th, and will peak overnight on August 12th at 60 sightings per hour. Unfortunately, the light from the moon will wash out many of the meteors, though the brightest should still be visible.

You still have a chance to see this. Look up and enjoy.

You can also watch it online using slooh.com 
Check out membership to control their satellites to look into the universe. Cool!
http://live.slooh.com/stadium/live/special-highlight-the-perseids-sensation

Also NASA has recorded some of it (of course):
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/51306509

Welcome Back and BIG NEWS

The Fields Prize has been awarded to a woman for the first time.

"Iranian-born mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani on Wednesday became the first woman to be awarded the Fields Medal, mathematics' equivalent to the Nobel Prize." Please read more in the CBC online here. 

You can also read more in The Guardian - a nice interview piece and The Stanford University press release, where Maryam Mirzakhani is a Professor of Mathematics. 

Thanks to Ajarn Lana for sharing this with the Mathematics department.

We are all working with Stanford University this year to develop our Mathematics and a growth mindset and you can puzzle over the famous puzzle that ignited her mathematical curiosity.

Add all of the numbers from 1 to 100 with a system that isn't 1+2+3+4 <-- there is a shortcut (:

LIVE SHARING - LIGHTNING STRIKES

COOL! GET IN
ENJOY

HERE

MYP3 Mathematicians Helping Others Understand Curves

Before I introduce three fabulous websites, I'd like to say that ALL of the MYP3 mathematicians have produced wonderful work demonstrating their understanding of curves and their transformations. Mathsland is proud to call them all citizens.

In our unit we were focusing on linear functions y=mx+p, and dipping into some quadratics but some decided they would like to go further and investigate other curves.

We had linear, quadratic, square root, Archimedes Spiral, sinusoidal and exponential curves. It was busy in Mathsland because everyone had different questions and a different adventure.

Three students, Annalis, Chanya and Eugene (alphabetical order chosen there), created websites using skills taught to them by the much beloved and missed Ajarn Marcus. By creating websites they are providing a service to other learners in the world of mathematics that want to know about sinusoidal waves and exponential functions.

Students used the desmos.com/calculator and its groovy sliders to play around with parameters to spot patterns.
check out some sliders here

Now for the websites:

Annalis' Exponentials are Cool

Eugene's Vas Are Sinusoidal Waves

Chanya's Parabolas

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