Let’s Play Math!

Sitting at home with a cold, tired of watching TV and playing video games, stumbled upon…

A great theorem from math history

The Infinitude of Primes

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Photo by rileyroxx.

Could this be my 500th post? That doesn’t seem possible, even counting all those half-finished-and-then-deleted drafts. Well, at least it is my 500th something, according to the WordPress.com dashboard. And surely a 500th anything is worth a small celebration, right?

Maybe my students aren’t so bad, after all…

It has been awhile since I posted a link to Rudbeckia Hirta’s Learning Curves blog. Here are a few of her students’ recent bloopers:

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Things are still hectic, but at least the phone company guy found the problem and got our “extended DSL” service working. “Extended DSL” is what you get when you live out in the boonies. No guarantees that it will be faster than the ancient modem, but at least it doesn’t tie up the phone line anymore.

And it is a bit faster, so I finally get to enjoy You Tube. If the video doesn’t display properly, you can find it at this link:

Funny Math Problems

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Here are a couple of quick links to math in the news:

MathTrek: A Prayer for Archimedes
It turns out Archimedes was even closer to discovering calculus than we had thought.

Tales of the golem: With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse
While Pythagoras, on the other hand, sees his place in math history threatened by an experimental disproof of the Pythagorean Theorem. [Hat tip: jd2718.]

• more math humor

This paper was read to the Adams Society (St. John’s College Mathematical Society) at their 25th anniversary dinner, Michaelmas Term, 1948. [Warning: Do not attempt to read this while drinking coffee or other spittable beverage!]

Hat tip: I found this through the math carnival at a mispelt bog.

Related Posts: more math humor

Blame it on MathNotations and his Corny Math Jokes (which actually included one I hadn’t heard before) — or maybe I have been reading too many of Chickenfoot’s strange tales — but anyway, I’m in a mood for humor.

So here are a couple of old favorites:

The Frivolous Theorem of Arithmetic
Almost all natural numbers are very, very, very large.

The First Strong Law of Small Numbers
There are not enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them.

— Eric W. Weisstein
from MathWorld–A Wolfram Web Resource

Hat tip: These had gotten lost in the dustbunnies of my memory until I saw the Frivolous Theorem mentioned recently at Art of Problem Solving.

Edited to add: Scott at Grey Matters recently updated his Mathematical Humor post, which may be where I had originally read these. He links to several more great MathWorld jokes, including the ever-tasty Pizza Theorem.

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• In between sneezes…
• That’s mathematics
• A Very Short History of Mathematics
• For those really long family trips…
• Math quotes III: Five out of four people

You have to see this to believe it. [From IB a Math Teacher at 3σ→Left.]

Or if your tastes run more to the literary than the mathematical, here are some real classics — plus information on how you can join in the fun.

• So You Think You Know Calculus?
• Finding the Limit
• Harmonic Series Quotation
• All Odd Numbers are Prime — a Corollary
• Nothing is Everything

Our whole family is coming down with something again. What a nuisance!

Since I don’t feel up to real cleaning, I guess it’s time to spruce up my sidebar. If you haven’t posted since November or December of last year, you’re outta there. And for those of you who use Blogger — well, I’m sorry, but if I get a persistent “Blogger: 404 - Page Not Found” then you’re gone, too. If you are still actively blogging, please send me an email.

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Discovered on a “mathematics” tag search:

Super-esoteric math humor

• more math humor

My algebra students could stand to hear this, too:

(2)(-4x²)ⁿ is not equal to (-8 )ⁿx²ⁿ.

AAAAAARRRRGGGHH!!!!

From Secret Message to My Calculus Students at Learning Curves blog.

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• algebra and beyond
• more math humor

Does this proof at squareCircleZ blog mean that, if I get nothing done today, I can cross off everything on my list?

Check out these related posts: more math humor

[Rescued from my old blog.]

Once again, Rudbeckia Hirta brings us some funny-but-sad mathematics. The test question was:

Without factoring it, explain how the number
N = (1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8 x 9 x 10 x 11) + 1
can be used to argue that there is a prime number larger than 11.

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