The Glowing Edge

Tag: math

  • Fibonacci Mail Art

    Fibonacci Mail Art

    The only thing better than getting mail art is getting Fibonnacci mail art.

    Well, I’ll allow that quantum mail art of some variety would be wicked cool too: imagine the possiblities for up, down, charm, and strange quark postcards. Or a Heisenberg card: you’d never know for certain both when it had been sent and when it arrived. But you could know one of those things.

    Sorry, I’ll stop with the geek jokes now. I was talking about my birthday.

    Because I had one last fall, and a month or so later my dear artist/author/sometime-zombie friend sent me this postcard with a Fibonacci series on it. She cuts this stuff out of extra copies of one of the books she’s published and then glues, sews, draws, and sends off dozens of these art-o-licious cards to people around the world, who also send her mail art back. She puts it all on her mail art blog and if you love getting mail art you should leave a comment over there and ask because she sends it to anyone, free! Amazing, in this day and age.

    But my birthday. Mary Jo knows I love to extend the party as long as possible, so she helps me with that by reminding me to keep on celebrating. My birthday cards can NEVER be late. It just isn’t possible. I’d go the whole year if I could do it and not be disowned by my family.

    And linking my birthday with art, extension of partytime, and Fibonnacci? Well, that’s quite a dramatic statement. A Fibonacci sequence falls into the following pattern:

    0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89…

    Each number is the sum of the previous two. Sounds simple, right? It is simple, but it is also astonishing. This beautiful spiraling series is all over the place: in sunflower heads, pine cones, avacados, pineapples, honeybees, nautilus shells, and ferns. Many flowering, curling, swooping things are designed and unfold in a Fibonacci series.

    I might just spiral through my celebrations in an endless swoon of mathematical artistry.

    You never thought about it quite that way, did you?

    By the way, I just got her Christmas (New Year’s, Martin Luther King Jr., Valentine’s Day) card in the mail. I have the coolest friends imaginable.

  • This Just Proves I’m a Nerd

    This Just Proves I’m a Nerd

    I didn’t bring this book home, the Husband did, but it had a really cool cover so I picked it up. And I meandered through the first several chapters because anything that explains my husband’s brain to me is frequently of interest.

    And after those first few chapters (during which I learned that Pythagoras was so aware of the import of his formulation of the Pythagorean Theorem that he ordered 100 oxen barbequed, super cool!) I suddenly stumbled on a gem: a chapter giving the foundations of physics.

    EVERY time someone asks the question, “Is light a particle or a wave?” I experience a rush of ecstasy.

    “Yes!” I shout, then force myself to stillness so that I can fully appreciate the story of the double-slit electron experiment. It’s like opening the same Christmas present every year; I already know what’s inside, I’m thrilled to be getting it again, and I can’t wait to play with my quantum erasers and half-alive, half-dead cats. The Copenhagen interpretation is my launch point into the greatest joys of the universe.

    For me, physics is like a hot tub in the middle of a giant parking lot full of gravel. Mathematics is the gravel.

    For me, physics is like a hot tub in the middle of a giant parking lot full of gravel. Mathematics is the gravel. I am forced to walk barefoot over all that wretched, sharp gravel before I can sink gratefully into the steaming warmth of physics, both quantum and planetary.

    My husband, on the other hand, is a born mathematician. For him, the gravel is actually the glowing, thousand-hued crystals of an enormous multi-dimensional puzzle; one he would happily spend the rest of his life working to solve. The hot tub he barely notices as he gleefully sorts crystals into organized piles, stacks, and towers.

    Sigh. I guess what I meant to say is that we’re both nerds.

  • The Maker is in Love

    The Maker is in Love

    With bar graphs. What could be more fun?

    Before Halloween, we had a family candy bowl, the contents of which I told him was mainly for his two brothers, who don’t trick or treat (house rule: no trick-or-treating after age 10). So the Maker carefully separated all the candy into equivalent piles for each brother and made them a handy chart to indicate which candy they could eat, with a box to check off when each candy-eating task was complete.

    His brothers were Not. Pleased.

    But I liked it, and I encouraged him to chart everything, anything; whatever suited his fancy. And he did. The picture above is one I snapped with my iPhone after he created a chart for his school snack (which he loves to put together each day).

    They’re currently everywhere in my house, these bar charts.

    Just wait til he learns about pie graphs, oooo.

  • The Donkey Behind Door Number Three

    The Donkey Behind Door Number Three

    Let’s say you’re on Monte Hall’s “Let’s Make a Deal” gameshow. You get to pick a hidden prize behind door number one, door number two, or door number three. The trick is that two of the doors hide donkeys, and only one door hides the Maserati.

    You pick door number one.

    The host, in the countdown to your choice, shows you that door number three hides a donkey, and you gasp in relief. Aren’t you glad you didn’t pick that door?

    Now Monte puts his arm around you in a confidential manner, and asks if you want to change your choice. Are you going to stick with door number one, or switch to door number two?

    This is the question the Husband posed to me on our Date Night, and I said what many people say: “I’ll stick with my choice.” I figured I had a 50-50 chance of winning.

    But the simple mathematical fact is that I’m more likely to win the car if I switch.

    I had no idea people had been arguing about this for years. I can remember reading The Parade, which came as an insert in The Commercial Appeal, which was the newspaper my family subscribed to as I was growing up in Memphis, Tennessee. I mostly pulled out and read The Parade to catch up on the latest gossip about movie stars, but there was and still is a column called “Ask Marilyn,” where super-smart Marilyn vos Savant (who was in the Guinness Book of World Records as the person with the highest recorded IQ — 228) employed her exceedingly sturdy gray matter to solve problems that readers sent in.

    And in September of 1990  her counsel in the 3-door situation was to switch your choice in order to increase your odds of winning. She received an estimated 10,000 letters from people telling her she was mistaken. But she wasn’t!

    The Husband is a major math geek, and he’s reading a book called The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, where he came across the “Let’s Make a Deal” scenario. After he told me about Marilyn and the switch, I picked up the book myself and devoured the third chapter where the explanation occurs.

    And basically I failed to take into consideration the game show host. You see, Monte knows the answer. He’s not going to reveal the car, he’s going to show you a donkey. And thus he changes the odds for you.

    At first you had a 1 in 3 chance of guessing right off where the car was. IF you were lucky and the car really IS behind door number one, you’ll obviously win if you stick, and the odds for that are 1 in 3. But if you guessed wrong and the car is behind door number two, you’ll win if you switch, and the odds for that are 2 in 3. That’s better odds, isn’t it? The strategy of switching is on average twice as successful as staying with the original choice.

    I know, it’s confusing, and it took me a few times to get it, but once I did, I was pumped! You can play it out here and see for yourself how it works.

    So. What the hell am I going to do with this miniscule tidbit of super-kewl information? I am going to be the megastar of the next party I go to, I’m telling you. Math nerds are red hot.

    Um, aren’t they?

    Image credit: Wikipedia

  • Math and Jello

    The Husband just sent me this fabulous email:

    * * *
    A couple of weeks ago, The Maker asked me if we could make some Jello. This morning I asked him if he’d rather read or make Jello and he said make Jello, so I said as soon as he cleaned up his breakfast mess and put away all the clean dishes we’d make Jello.

    So I have him read the directions on the back (the word gelatin was challenging), and get out all the stuff we need, including the measuring cup, and as he’s getting out the measuring cup he asks if he can do all the measuring because he likes to measure stuff, and then he says, seemingly out of nowhere, “I like numbers.”

    I asked him why he liked numbers and he said, “Cause you can do so many different things with them. You can measure stuff, you can multiply them, you can add and subtract them, you can count with them. Also, they make patterns.” I said I liked the patterns that numbers make, too. Then I said numbers can also be used to predict things, and he asked what that meant and before I could tell him my example of a graph that kept going up so you could predict what the next number was going to be, he said, “Oh, I know!” and proceeded to explain how if you were counting by fours, you’d go 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, etc. and then you’d know the next number would be 24.

    Then we made the Jello. Actually he made it, I just sat and typed this email.

    * * *

    Happy sigh.

  • indexed


    If you don’t already regularly enjoy Jessica Hagy’s blog Indexed, you should begin now. The book comes out in Feb ’08, too late for Christmas giving, but in plenty of time for next year. I should have added this awesome woman to Must Clicks long ago.

  • Math Genius?


    During a recent parent-child homework session we discovered that the Husband can instantly and simultaneously solve four addition flash cards, held upside down by one bemused wife and one increasingly astonished 7 year old son. If we’d had more sons present at the time, the challenge might have escalated. So here is a sentence I thought I would never utter: We’re all looking forward to the next math study session.

  • Needed: More Hungry Boys

    The Ice loves to cook. This weekend he wanted to make biscuits, a favorite for us. I requested a double batch, since the single barely makes it around the table in our family. The Ice has never made a double batch of anything before, so we talked about careful measurements and keeping track. He waved me out of the kitchen, preheated the oven, and happily began.

    Ten minutes later I heard a plaintive “Mom, this isn’t right.” Oh boy.

    “Did you put in each ingredient twice?” I asked.

    “Yeeee-ah,” he responded slowly, “but something’s wrong with it. It isn’t supposed to look like this.”

    I peered in to see a soupy mess in the bowl. A whole lot of soupy mess. Yikes.

    We ran the check together. “Did you measure the Bisquick in twice?”

    He had.

    “Did you measure the milk in twice? Two-thirds of a cup, two times?”

    He nodded, pointing to the measuring cup as proof. Ahh.

    We have a four-cup measuring cup. Since the first measurement on the cup is a giant “1” I knew exactly what had happened. He had measured one and two thirds of a cup in. Twice. Which equals soup.

    I shook the Bisquick box — still heavy. “I just loooove biscuits,” I told him jauntily, and dumped in the rest of the box. Well, I do.

    We had five batches of biscuits for dinner. They were very good, they were. If you were here, we would share them with you. And send some home with you, too. Some for your neighbors as well.