Author: John Quintanilla

I'm a Professor of Mathematics and a University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of North Texas. For eight years, I was co-director of Teach North Texas, UNT's program for preparing secondary teachers of mathematics and science.

Engaging students: Deriving the Pythagorean Theorem

In my capstone class for future secondary math teachers, I ask my students to come up with ideas for engaging their students with different topics in the secondary mathematics curriculum. In other words, the point of the assignment was not to devise a full-blown lesson plan on this topic. Instead, I asked my students to think about three different ways of getting their students interested in the topic in the first place.

I plan to share some of the best of these ideas on this blog (after asking my students’ permission, of course).

This student submission comes from my former student Emma Sivado. Her topic, from Geometry: deriving the Pythagorean Theorem.

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How has this topic appeared in pop culture?

What if I told you that knowing the Pythagorean Theorem could help you become a millionaire? We’re all familiar with the popular game show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” so let me take you back to 2007 when Ryan was playing for $16,000. The question asks “which of these square numbers is the sum of two smaller square numbers.” We see the sweat immediately begin to accumulate on his brow as he struggles to find the right answer. He quickly goes to his life lines and asks the audience. The majority say the answer is 16. Ryan contemplates for a minute before going with the audience and selecting 16. Disappointment follows as we discover this is the wrong answer and Meredith explains that the answer is 25 or 42+32=52.

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How can this topic be used in your student’s future courses in mathematics or science?

The Pythagorean Theorem is first taught in Geometry, according to the TEKS, and is expected to be defined, proved, and executed by these students. However, many people say that the Pythagorean Theorem is the basis of trigonometry, which is studied in depth in the student’s pre-calculus course. Beyond pre-calculus applications, the Pythagorean Theorem is used in physics to calculate kinetic energy, in computer science to compute processing time, and in social media to prove Metcalfe’s Law. Beyond math and science, the theorem is used in architecture and construction to determine distances, heights, and angles, in video games to draw in 3-D, and in triangulation to locate cell phone signals.

 

 

 

 

 

Engaging students: Proving that the measures of a triangle’s angles add to 180 degrees

In my capstone class for future secondary math teachers, I ask my students to come up with ideas for engaging their students with different topics in the secondary mathematics curriculum. In other words, the point of the assignment was not to devise a full-blown lesson plan on this topic. Instead, I asked my students to think about three different ways of getting their students interested in the topic in the first place.

I plan to share some of the best of these ideas on this blog (after asking my students’ permission, of course).

This student submission comes from my former student A’Lyssa Rodriguez. Her topic, from Geometry: proving that the measures of a triangle’s angles add to 180 degrees.

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How could you as a teacher create an activity or project that involves your topic?

People generally do not believe something until they can see it for themselves. So this activity can help do just that. Each student will receive a sheet of paper. They are then asked to draw a triangle on that sheet of paper and cut it out. Having each student draw their own triangle allows for many types of triangles and further proving the point later. Once the triangles are cut, each student will rip off each angle from the triangle. Next, they will arrange those pieces so that each vertex is touching the other. Once all the vertices are touching, they will notice that a straight line is formed and therefore proving that the sum of a triangles angles all add up to 180 degrees.

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What interesting things can you say about the people who contributed to the discovery and/or the development of this topic?

Euclid proves that the measures of a triangle’s angles add up to two right angles (I. 32) in the compilation geometrical proofs better known as Euclid’s Elements. This compilation was actually all the known mathematics at the time.  So not all of the theorems were written or discovered by Euclid, rather by several individuals such as Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Theudius, Theaetetus and Eudoxus. Euclid’s Elements actually consist of 465 theorems, all of which are proven with only a ruler (straight edge) and compass. This book was so important to the mathematical community that it remained the main book of geometry for over 2,000 years. It wasn’t until the early 19th century that non-Euclidean geometry was considered.

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How has this topic appeared in high culture (art, classical music, theatre, etc.)?

Students can be given a variety of images such as the Louvre, the pyramids in Egypt, certain types of sports plays, and the Epcot center in Disney World and then be asked what they all have in common. It may or may not be hard for them to notice but they all have triangles. Then, hand the students the same images but with the triangles outlined and with the measurement of all the angles. They can then compute the sum of the angles for each triangle. Each triangle obviously looks different and all the angles are different but the sum will always be 180 degrees.

 

Resources
http://www.storyofmathematics.com/hellenistic_euclid.html

 

 

 

 

Engaging students: Finding the volume and surface area of spheres

In my capstone class for future secondary math teachers, I ask my students to come up with ideas for engaging their students with different topics in the secondary mathematics curriculum. In other words, the point of the assignment was not to devise a full-blown lesson plan on this topic. Instead, I asked my students to think about three different ways of getting their students interested in the topic in the first place.

I plan to share some of the best of these ideas on this blog (after asking my students’ permission, of course).

This student submission comes from my former student Avery Fortenberry. His topic, from Algebra: finding the volume and surface area of spheres.

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How does this topic extend what your students should have learned in their previous courses?

The topic of volume and surface area of spheres is building upon the students’ knowledge of area and circumference of a circle.  A sphere is similar to a circle in that a circle is a closed shape with all points equidistant from the centerpoint (the distance is the radius) and a sphere is a closed object with all points at an equal distance from its centerpoint (the distance is also r).  Students will be familiar with the area of a circle formula, which is A=πr2 and will be able to easily use and understand the formula for volume of a sphere V=(4/3)πr3.  The same is true for circumference in relation with surface area.

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What interesting things can you say about the people who contributed to the discovery and/or the development of this topic?

Archimedes was the first mathematician to discover the most important ratio in all of mathematics, π.  He did this by finding the area of a circle using shapes that were incrementally closer and closer to the same size as that circle.  In other words, he would start with a circle and enclose it within a square, then a pentagon, then a hexagon, and so on until he came extremely close to the same shape.  He used this same method to find the volume of a sphere by enclosing it within a cylinder of a known volume and cutting out piece by piece and measuring until he found the parabolic segment is 4/3 that of an inscribed triangle.

Source: http://www.storyofmathematics.com/hellenistic_archimedes.html

 

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What are the contributions of various cultures to this topic?

This topic had many cultures contribute to the understanding of it.  These contributions came from Greek, Chinese, and Arabic mathematicians.  The Greek contribution came mainly from Archimedes, which I discussed in D1.  The Arithmetic Art in Nine Chapters is a Chinese book written in the 1st century that gave a formula that was close but not exact to finding the volume of a sphere.  The author of the book calculated pi as being equal to 25/8 or even as just 3 at times.  Ancient Arabic mathematicians submitted very similar ideas to the Chinese in terms of the volume of a sphere.  While it is known the Chinese derived some ideas from the Greeks, it is still unclear today how the ideas were spread to the Arabic mathematicians.

Source: http://www.muslimheritage.com/article/volume-sphere-arabic-mathematics-historical-and-analytical-survey#sec2.2

 

 

 

 

Engaging students: Finding the slope of a line

In my capstone class for future secondary math teachers, I ask my students to come up with ideas for engaging their students with different topics in the secondary mathematics curriculum. In other words, the point of the assignment was not to devise a full-blown lesson plan on this topic. Instead, I asked my students to think about three different ways of getting their students interested in the topic in the first place.

I plan to share some of the best of these ideas on this blog (after asking my students’ permission, of course).

This student submission again comes from my former student Jason Trejo. His topic, from Algebra: finding the slope of a line.

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A2) How could you as a teacher create an activity or project that involves your topic?

I have to start off by giving some credit to my 5th grade math teacher for giving me the idea on how I could create an activity involving this topic. You see, back in my 5th grade math class, we were to plot points given to us on a Cartesian plane and then connect the dots to create a picture (which turned out to be a caveman). Once we created the picture, we were to add more to it and the best drawing would win a prize. My idea is to split the class up into groups and give them an assortment of lines on separate pieces of transparent graphing sheets. They would then find the slopes and trace over the line in a predetermined color (e.g. all lines with m=2 will be blue, when m=1/3 then red, etc.). Next they stack each line with matching slopes above the other to create pictures like this:

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Of course, what I have them create would be more intricate and colorful, but this is the idea for now. It is also possible to have the students fine the slope of lines at certain points to create a picture like I did back in 5th grade and then have them color their drawing. They would end up with pictures such as:

slopeart3

 

 

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C1) How has this topic appeared in pop culture (movies, TV, current music, videogames, etc.)?

Sure there aren’t many places where finding the slope of a line will be the topic that everyone goes on and one about on TV or on the hottest blog or all over Vine (whatever that is), but take a look around and you will be able to see a slope maybe on a building or from the top of Tom Hank’s head to the end of his shadow. Think about it, with enough effort, anyone could imagine a coordinate plane “behind” anything and try to find the slop from one point to another. The example I came up with goes along with this picture I edited:

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*Picture not accurately to scale

This is the infamous, first double backflip ever landed in a major competition. The athlete: Travis Pastrana; the competition: the 2006 X-Games.

I would first show the video (found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLKERGvwBQ8), then show them the picture above to have them solve for each of the different slopes seen. In reality this is a parabola, but we can break up his motion to certain points in the trick (like when Travis is on the ground or when Travis is upside down for the first backflip). When the students go over parabolas at a later time, we could then come back to this picture.

 

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B2) How does this topic extend what your students should have learned in previous courses?

It has been many years since I was first introduced to finding the slope of the line so I’m not sure exactly when I learned it, but I do know that I at least saw what a line was in 5th grade based on the drawing project I stated earlier. At that point, all I knew was to plot points on a graph and “connect the dots”, so this builds on that by actually being able to give a formula for those lines that connected the dots. Other than that, finding slopes on a Cartesian plane can give more insight on what negative numbers are and how they relate to positive numbers. Finally, students should have already learned about speed and time, so by creating a representation how those two relate, a line can be drawn. The students would see the rate of change based on speed and time.

 

References:

Minimalistic Landscape: http://imgur.com/a/44DNn

Minimalistic Flowers: http://imgur.com/Kwk0tW0

Graphing Projects: http://www.hoppeninjamath.com/teacherblog/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Photo-Feb-25-5-32-24-PM.jpg

Double Backflip Image: http://cdn.motocross.transworld.net/files/2010/03/tp_doubleback_final.jpg

Double Backflip Video: : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLKERGvwBQ8

 

 

A curious non-randomness in the distribution of primes

I found this article extremely interesting. From https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160313-mathematicians-discover-prime-conspiracy/

Among the first billion prime numbers, for instance, a prime ending in 9 is almost 65 percent more likely to be followed by a prime ending in 1 than another prime ending in 9. In a paper posted online today [March 13, 2016], Kannan Soundararajan and Robert Lemke Oliver of Stanford University present both numerical and theoretical evidence that prime numbers repel other would-be primes that end in the same digit, and have varied predilections for being followed by primes ending in the other possible final digits…

This conspiracy among prime numbers seems, at first glance, to violate a longstanding assumption in number theory: that prime numbers behave much like random numbers. Most mathematicians would have assumed… that a prime should have an equal chance of being followed by a prime ending in 1, 3, 7 or 9 (the four possible endings for all prime numbers except 2 and 5).

Teens do better in science when they know Einstein and Curie also struggled

From http://qz.com/622749/teens-do-better-in-science-when-they-know-einstein-and-curie-also-struggled/:

The study, published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, divided 402 ninth- and 10th-graders from four New York City public schools in Harlem and the Bronx into three groups. One group read an 800-word excerpt from a scientific textbook on the accomplishments of Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Michael Faraday (an English scientist who made discoveries about electromagnetism).

Another group learned about the scientists’ personal struggles, such as the fact that Einstein had to flee Nazi Germany to avoid persecution, or Marie Curie had to study in secret because women were discouraged from academic pursuits at the time. The third group learned about the scientists’ intellectual struggles and how they confronted them.

After six weeks, the two groups who learned about how the scientists struggled significantly improved their science grades and increased their motivation to study science. The lowest performing students showed the greatest gains.

Meanwhile, the students who learned only about the scientists’ achievements performed worse. They believed the scientists were innately gifted—unlike themselves.

Statisticians Found One Thing They Can Agree On: It’s Time To Stop Misusing P-Values

From the excellent article http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/statisticians-found-one-thing-they-can-agree-on-its-time-to-stop-misusing-p-values/

A common misconception among nonstatisticians is that p-values can tell you the probability that a result occurred by chance. This interpretation is dead wrong, but you see it again and again and again and again. The p-value only tells you something about the probability of seeing your results given a particular hypothetical explanation — it cannot tell you the probability that the results are true or whether they’re due to random chance…

Nor can a p-value tell you the size of an effect, the strength of the evidence or the importance of a result. Yet despite all these limitations, p-values are often used as a way to separate true findings from spurious ones, and that creates perverse incentives…

If there’s one takeaway from the ASA statement, it’s that p-values are not badges of truth and p < 0.05 is not a line that separates real results from false ones. They’re simply one piece of a puzzle that should be considered in the context of other evidence.

The article above links to the statement by the American Statistical Association as well as various commentaries by statisticians about the proper use of p-values.