Discrete Ideas

Someone over at Stetson University1 has compiled a list of numbers2 with the reasons they might be termed “special”. Some of these reasons are out there, and maybe a little contrived, but I’ve found a few that I like. Take some time to browse this list, and I’m sure you’ll find something of interest. If not, check out the the entire list.

Continue reading Significance

Happy Birthday to me. Yes, that’s right, you’re friendly Count was born 40 years ago today, which just happened to be Labor Day in 1969. In light of this special event, I’ve prepared a little set of numbers just for fun. None of this is particularly important, just a bit of mind-candy for my birthday. So let’s go!

40 years on this Earth has some easy conversions into smaller time periods. 480 months makes 2,080 weeks pretty easily. Days is more of a problem, as there are some irregularities in the Leap Day counts. As it happens, those 40 years turned into 14,600 days at 365/year plus 10 leap days is 14,610 total days. This computes to 350,400 hours, times 60 for 21,024,000 minutes, and again for 1,261,440,000 seconds. That’s right, over a billion seconds I’ve been alive!

Continue reading Counting time

Shortcuts are a great way to do a lot of math in your head. You know the guy in the office that always responds when you ask “What’s 25 times 56?” He’s using shortcuts, and so can you. The best thing about these so-called tricks? They always have a real math basis, or they wouldn’t work! Here are a few multiplication shortcuts. Learn them, and you’ll see how often the situations for which they are useful show up.

What’s the square of [some number > 20]? Does this come up for you very often? Well, maybe not, but from the square you can get great estimates on other products, and you’ll be surprised how often you come across the problems when you can easily solve them. Now, no one really expects you to memorize all the squares to 100 but, with a few shortcuts, you can compute most of them fairly easily.
Continue reading The shortest path

You may have noticed that I like math. This is not a new thing for me. Math has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and not in the organic sense of counting blocks or birthdays. My parents, both with degrees in mathematics, spent a good amount of time making sure I had no troubles in school in any field, but especially math. Now that I have kids, I’ve been doing my own part to make sure they never need to spend valuable school time figuring out the math on the board, they already got it at home. Note, this doesn’t exactly make me a favorite parent with their teachers; making kids “bored” in school doesn’t endear me to them, but teaching them is such fun I can’t really help myself.

Counting from 1 to 10 is something kids get from many sources; television, children’s books, etc. I won’t cover that here, and my kids could count a bit higher than that when I started with these exercises. The following are several good methods to used to give kids the tools to solve most any math problem they can think of.

Number Line: The first basic math technique you should teach a child is the number line1. This gives kids a handy way to compute sums and differences without breaking out the fingers and toes. Try creating several worksheets where each row has its own number line followed by a single-digit addition problem.

Continue reading Making more math geeks

Baseball is a game of numbers. Players move from team to team, teams change cities (admittedly, less than in other sports), and sometimes even their names, but real fans always remember the numbers. This was brought home, to me at least, last Friday night when Jonathan Sanchez of the San Francisco Giants threw a no-hitter against the San Diego Padres. His feat, already a rarity, was made even more special in that he missed a perfect game by only an error by his third-baseman during the 8th inning. Let’s take a look at some of the numbers involved in baseball’s most rare occurrences.

Long ago, Major League Baseball coined the term “modern era” for games played starting in the year 1900 onward. Although the modern rules were instituted in 1893, we’ll take the following statistics from the modern era:

Continue reading The heart of baseball, served rare

Ah, there’s nothing quite like the geek joke. When you hear one, you’re torn between not wanting to look stupid and not wanting to look too smart! I’ve heard a lot of them in my time, and thought I’d share some of my favorites with you here.

Not only does this joke require some small bit of knowledge to get, but this classic example of the geek joke even refers to the separation between those who will get the joke and the rest of humanity. Not a bad start.

Continue reading Classical Geek jokes