Tuesday, November 30, 2010

this old math blog



This post is an attempt to sum up the contents of mathrecreation. New stuff might get posted at some point, so this might not be a final halmos.

Some of the best posts were (not surprisingly) pointers to other people's stuff - Math Teachers at Play 17 and 23, and the Carnival of Mathematics 63.

Polygonal numbers were the main recreation explored on this blog - most of the posts on these can be found by wandering around.

Looking at polygonal numbers leads to looking at number triangles. In addition to Pascal, others found here include Lucas, Catalan, and the Harmonic Denominator Triangle.

Personally, I liked the book/article reviews - there really were not enough of them. These included Mesopotamian maths, friendly math, math frogs, and mathematical tree climbing.

At one point I worked on developing resources for high school teachers using Fathom, Tinkerplots, and GSP. Posts about these included Monty hall, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, false positives, pi quilts,  Wallace lines, and the scrambler.

The fun of making mathematically themed objects can't be overstated. Origami is a great vehicle for this, particularly modular origami; but sometimes you might want to glue stuff together.