I’m taking a break from my usual posts on mathematics and mathematics education to note a symbolic milestone: meangreenmath.com has had more than 250,000 total page views since its inception in June 2013. Many thanks to the followers of this blog, and I hope that you’ll continue to find this blog to be a useful resource to you.

Twenty most viewed individual posts:

1. All I want to be is a high school teacher. Why do I have to take Real Analysis?
2. Analog clocks
3. Anatomy of a teenager’s brain
4. Beautiful dance moves
5. Finger trick for multiplying by 9
6. Full lesson plan: magic squares
7. Full lesson plan: Platonic solids
8. Fun with dimensional analysis
9. High-pointing a football?
10. Importance of the base case in a proof by induction
11. Infraction
12. Math behind Super Mario
13. My “history” of solving cubic, quartic and quintic equations
14. Sometimes, violence is the answer
15. Student misconceptions about PEMDAS
16. Teaching the Chain Rule inductively
17. Thoughts on silly viral math puzzles
18. Valentine’s Day card
19. Was there a Pi Day on 3/14/1592?
20. Welch’s formula

Twenty most viewed series:

1. 2048 and algebra
2. Another poorly written word problem
3. Area of a triangle and volume of common shapes
4. Arithmetic and geometric series
5. Calculators and complex numbers
6. Common Core, subtraction, and the open number line
7. Computing e to any power
8. Different definitions of e
9. Exponential growth and decay
10. Fun lecture on geometric series
11. Inverse Functions
12. Langley’s Adventitious Angles
13. My Mathematical Magic Show
14. Predicate Logic and Popular Culture
15. Reminding students about Taylor series
16. Slightly incorrect ugly mathematical Christmas T-shirts
17. Square roots and logarithms without a calculator
18. Wason selection task
19. What I learned from reading “Gamma: Exploring Euler’s Constant” by Julian Havil
20. Why does and ?

Twenty most viewed posts (guest presenters):

1. Engaging students: Classifying polygons
2. Engaging students: Congruence
3. Engaging students: Distinguishing between axioms, postulates, theorems, and corollaries
4. Engaging students: Distinguishing between inductive and deductive reasoning
5. Engaging students: Equation of a circle
6. Engaging students: Factoring quadratic polynomials
7. Engaging students: Finding the domain and range of a function
8. Engaging students: Finding x- and y-intercepts
9. Engaging students: Inverse Functions
10. Engaging students: Laws of Exponents
11. Engaging students: Pascal’s triangle
12. Engaging students: Solving linear systems of equations by either substitution or graphing
13. Engaging students: Solving linear systems of equations with matrices
14. Engaging students: Solving one-step and two-step inequalities
15. Engaging students: Solving quadratic equations
16. Engaging students: Square roots
17. Engaging students: Translation, rotation, and reflection of figures
18. Engaging students: Using a truth table
19. Engaging students: Using right-triangle trigonometry
20. Engaging students: Verifying trigonometric identities

If I’m still here at that time, I’ll make a summary post like this again when this blog has over 500,000 page views.

Another bonehead word problem. Notice the word “her”. While Usain Bolt holds the current 100-meter world record of 9.58 seconds, the women’s world record is currently 10.49 seconds.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/FloTrack/photos/a.432324889444/10156764197654445/?type=3&theater

Here’s another T-shirt that I found in my quest for the perfect ugly mathematical Christmas sweater: https://www.amazon.com/Fibonacci-Christmas-Tree-Holiday-Shirt/dp/B07KCF1F6D/

Unlike the shirt in my previous post, this one actually gets the first ten rows of Pascal’s triangle correct. So that’s a good thing.

There’s one small error: while the Fibonacci numbers can be found by adding along shallow diagonals of Pascal’s triangle, this really shouldn’t be called a “Fibonacci Christmas Tree.”

Oops.

I didn’t know this interesting bit of internet history:

“It’s July 1977,” Hellman tells the audience. “Whit and I are involved in a major fight with NSA over the data encryption standard.”

American law banned the unlicensed export of weapons. Makes sense: the government doesn’t want civilians wandering into Moscow with a trenchcoat full of fighter jet parts. The question is: Does this law apply to abstract mathematical ideas? By developing new approaches to cryptography, are Hellman, Diffie, and their collaborators de facto arms traffickers? If so, Hellman says, “then by publishing our papers in international journals, we are in some sense exporting plans for implements of war.”

Using the British day/month/year format of abbreviating dates, today is 2/7/18, matching the first four significant digits in the decimal expansion of .

Using the British convention, it’ll be Day again on 27/1/82, or January 27, 2082. I doubt I’ll personally be around to see that one, but I was alive to enjoy January 27, 1982. At the time, I was (barely) old enough to know the significance of the number , but I wasn’t old enough to know that other parts of the world abbreviate dates in a way different than Americans.

In the United States, today is 2/7/18, matching the first four significant digits of .

The next time that this date can be celebrated is July 2, 2018 (using the day/month/year format of abbreviated dates.) After that, we’ll have to wait until 27/1/82, or January 27, 2082. (Sadly, I knew about the number back in 1982 but was then unaware of the day/month/year method of abbreviating dates, and so this day went unrecognized by me on January 27, 1982.)

Source: https://www.facebook.com/1698785500391556/photos/a.1698786577058115.1073741828.1698785500391556/1909519182651519/?type=3&theater

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: An Instructor Saw Digital Distraction in Class. So She Showed Students What She’d Seen on Their Screens.

Students get distracted in class, and all the shiny baubles that grab their attention are well chronicled. But what happens when students are presented with the greatest hits from their browsing history for an entire semester?

A graduate-student instructor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Meg Veitch, did just that. In an effort to keep students focused, she tracked all the times she had spotted them digitally wandering in class. She didn’t have access to their complete browsing history; rather, she used the low-tech method of writing down what she had spotted on students’ screens…

Ms. Veitch, who studies paleontology, presented her findings this week in a PowerPoint show for the class of roughly 160, which gave at least one student a chance to snap and share Ms. Veitch’s observations on Twitter: