John Urschel, Ravens Offensive Lineman, Publishes Math Paper

I absolutely love this article from NPR: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/03/20/394340722/john-urschel-ravens-offensive-lineman-publishes-math-paper?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150321

Some highlights:

John Urschel is an offensive lineman for the NFL Baltimore Ravens whose Twitter handle is @MathMeetsFball. He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in math [from Penn State[, both with a 4.0 grade-point average. And this week he tweeted: “My paper, A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector…, has been published in the Journal of Computational Mathematics”

Here’s a link to his article: http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.0565.

Another great quote:

“I have a bright career ahead of me in mathematics. Beyond that, I have the means to make a good living and provide for my family, without playing football. I have no desire to try to accumulate $10 million in the bank; I already have more money in my bank account than I know what to do with. I drive a used hatchback Nissan Versa and live on less than $25k a year. It’s not because I’m frugal or trying to save for some big purchase, it’s because the things I love the most in this world (reading math, doing research, playing chess) are very, very inexpensive.”

Square any number up to 1000 without a calculator

The Mathematical Association of America has an excellent series of 10-minute lectures on various topics in mathematics that are nevertheless accessible to the general public, including gifted elementary school students.  From the YouTube description:

Mathemagician Art Benjamin [professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College] demonstrates and explains the mathematics underlying a mental arithmetic technique for quickly squaring numbers.

A veteran teacher turned coach shadows 2 students for 2 days – a sobering lesson learned

Last October, I read the following interesting blog post about a teacher who placed herself in the position of her students for a couple of days: http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/a-veteran-teacher-turned-coach-shadows-2-students-for-2-days-a-sobering-lesson-learned/

The lessons learned from this exercise partially explain why I’m an advocate for inquiry-based learning… under the firm presupposition that teaching with this method is an acquired skill, and that this technique can go south in a hurry if it’s not exercised properly.

How Sports Can Help Your Kids Outsmart Everyone Else

Some quotes from the very nice op-ed piece at http://time.com/3510480/sports-math-financial-literacy/:

In her excellent book, Race to the Top, the journalist Elizabeth Green tells a story of a new hamburger that the A&W Restaurant chain introduced to the masses. Weighing 1/3 of a pound, it was meant to compete with McDonald’s quarter-pounder and was priced comparably. But the “Third Pounder” failed miserably. Consultants were mystified until they realized many A&W customers believed that they were paying the same for less meat than they got at McDonald’s. Why? Because four is bigger than three, so wouldn’t ¼ be more than 1/3?…

Just as a game is packed with fractions, probability, equations and even multi-variable calculus if you’re so inclined, so too is it a laboratory for risk assessment, principles of finance and behavioral economics—an emerging field that looks at the effects of psychology and emotion on economic decision-making…

Sports also provide a context for probability. Broadcasters may ask questions hypothetically, but real answers exist. Jones is only a 40% free-throw shooter but he makes both. What are the odds of that?

If only one day a response would come: Well, I’ll tell you, Bob. Forty percent is 4/10. Multiply that twice for the two shots. 4/10 x 4/10 = 16/100 or 16%. Not good odds, but not extraordinarily rare, either.

If nothing else, any kid who’s been to both a hockey game and a basketball game knows the difference between thirds and quarters, and, in turn, would have picked the right burger.