Requirements: A coin for each student & smart board or data projector.
First ask your students to toss a coin 10 times each.
Ask each student how many heads in a row they threw.
Now ask students ‘Do you think it is possible to throw 10 heads in a row?
It can be done. Here is how you do it.
Derren Brown is a UK mentalist, magician, hypnotist and maths guru. He’s awesome. He shows audiences how a lack of understanding maths, especially probability, leads to misinterpreting the facts.
This is the most awesome way to introduce probability.
Mentalist Derren Brown devises a foolproof gambling system. He sends a girl , Kadisha, the number of a winning horse in race to be run the next day. It wins. He sends her the winning horse and race number 4 more times. She ends up with winnings close to £ 1000 before the final race. Derren convinces her to borrow money for the last bet. She does. She places £4,000 on a horse. Did it win?????
Watch Part 5 of The System
If you are not convinced Derren Brown can come up with a foolproof system for horse race tipping, let me explain The System. He took 7,776 e-mail addresses, divided them into 6 equal groups and sent each group a different number for a horse in a 6 horse race to be run the next day. Naturally, one group of 1296 had been given the winning horse number. This group was divided into 6 again and given the number of the ‘winning’ in a six horse race the next day and so on.
Race 1: 7776
Race 2: 1296
Race 3: 216
Race 4: 36
Race 5: 6
Out of 7776 punters, only one punter was given in advance five horse race winners in a row. Was it Kadisha. You will have to watch the Youtube above.
You can watch THE SYSTEM in full here. It takes 47 mins.
So you wanna be FAMOUS and fabulous and uber-cool too.
Maybe you wanna be the Chris Rock of maths. Being famous is soooooo cool.
…………….……You get attitude!!!
……………………You Get cool sunglasses!!!
….You get a chauffeur that’s not your mum!
But what are the chances? What is the probability that a kid at your school will become famous one day? Cate Blanchet went to Mathpigs kids’ school. But in Australia we don’t make a fuss. They haven’t put a picture of her on the wall or anything.
So mathspigs let’s work out the probability of you becoming a STAR, BABY!
The first question is how do you measure fame? Do you have to be on TV to be famous? Do you have to be a Hollywood star? Should you be a wax dummy in Madame Tussaud’s? Not as a job. I mean because you are so fabulously famous.
Perhaps, you could use Tom Weller’s humorous Rictus scale (a parody of the Richter Scale) for earthquake intensity using media coverage as a guide to fame. Just replace the persons name for the word ‘scene’.
I’m thinking around ’5′ looks like FAME, but you decide. Now count how many ex-students from your school (and any current ones) who have become famous in the last 20 years and do the maths.
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Rictus
Scale #
Richter Scale
Equivalent
Media Coverage
1
0-3
Small articles in local papers
2
3-5
Lead story on local news; mentioned on network news
3
5-6.5
Lead story on network news; photos in nation newspapers; governor visits scene
4
6.5-7.5
Network correspondents sent to scene; president/PM visits area; commemorative T-shirts appear
5
7.5 up
Covers of weekly news magazines; network specials; “instant books” appear
The.skeptics acknowledge two recorded cases of death by laughing. On 24 March 1975, Alex Mitchell, a 50-year-old bricklayer from King’s Lynn, England, died laughing while watching the “Kung Fu Kapers” episode of The Goodies, featuring a kilt-clad Scotsman with his bagpipes battling “Ecky Thump”, who was armed with a black pudding
and
Damnoen Saen-um, a Thai ice cream salesman, is reported to have died in 2003 while laughing in his sleep at the age of 52.
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Wikipedia claims one American died in 2012 from laughing. This claim cannot be confirmed.
Even if one case was reported look at the odds or probability:
Die Laughing : 1 in 7,000,000,000 for the World
or 1 in 310,000,000 in the USA.
This is a much lower probability according to Oddee than dying in the USA from:
Roller Coasters
1 in 77.5 million
Vending Machines
1 in 24 million
Falling out of bed
1 in 690,000
Texting while driving
1 in 62,000
Meanwhile LiveScience puts the probability of dying in the States from:
Note Mathspigs: Reading statistics requires brains. The probability of you dying from legal execution is ZERO if you have not murdered anyone. The probability of dying from a Vending Machine is almost ZERO if you never go near one. One could, of course, fall of the back off the back of a truck. The probability of dying from heart disease is very low at 12 years of age.
Death by Maths:
Here is the exercise my pretties.
Put these statistics into a bar graph. The exercise is really looking at GRAPH SCALES because once you put in Heart Disease everything else almost disappears off the graph.
The Hunger Games is about MATHS. Here are some interesting Hunger Game statistics.
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THE PLOT:
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In Suzanne Collin’s book, The Hunger Games, 12 districts in the land of Panem are suppressed and controlled by a vicious elite, who dress like neon-coloured French courtesans.
Each year the cruel rulers select one teen of each sex between the ages of 12 and 18 from each district to become tributes, who must fight to the death in a televised, sponsor-supported media event called The Hunger Games, set in a staged wilderness.
Only one tribute can survive. Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark from the poor coal-mining District 12 are the local tributes for that year and must play at being star-crossed lovers to gain sponsor support and survive.
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THE MATHS:
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……………………………………………….……..The Reaping…..
Tributes are selected in a process called The Reaping. The names of the, approximately, 2,000 young people in each district are placed in separate barrels for males and females and the names are drawn out of these barrels BUT…
……………………………….
12 year olds …….. 1 slip
13 year olds …….. 2 slips
14 year olds …….. 3 slips
15 year olds …….. 4 slips
16 year olds …….. 5 slips
17 year olds …….. 6 slips
18 year olds …….. 7 slips
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BUT you can gain extra ‘food’ if you accept for more name slips.
Gale Hawthorne (pictured above), Katnis’ friend from District 12, has 42 slips in the barrel. What are his chances?
We will assume that there are 1,000 teens of each sex in each district and an equal distribution – rounded off – for each age group to 1000/7 = 143
The closing ceremony is chaos. All the athletes crowd together.
There is one last lot of calculations, mathspigs.
Think about this.
% Gold Medal Winners:
At the 2012 London Olympics there will be 47 Gold medals awarded in athletics.
There will be 2,000 athletes competing for these medals. Now some athletes will win more than one Gold medal and some events eg. the relay race involve more than one athlete. Each member of the winning relay team wins a Gold Medal.
Approximately what % of athletes won’t win a Gold Medal at the London Olympics?
Ans: 97.65%
Probability of Winning a Gold Medal:
Ha-HA! Tricked ya! Such a calculation would be meaningless.
The core to all probability is, or should be, RANDOM SELECTION.
Lottery balls fall randomly into the tube. But the Olympic athletes represent a BIASED SAMPLE. Athletes are selected for the games. They must qualify for an event. They train. The chance of one athlete winning is quite different from that of another.
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Eight numbered 100m-sprint athletes is a Biased Sample.
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Eight numbered lottery balls in last nights draw make up a random sample.
This brings us to the end of the Lego Olympics.
We will finish with this end song by Lego Rock Band and some Lego fireworks.
Your mission, mathspigs, if you choose, is to spread mathematical thinking.
THE GOOD
We seek to establish patterns in numbers using equations, algorithms and/or graphs.
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THE BAD
But we ALSO endeavour to debunk those who attribute magical meaning to numbers. Numerologists, psychics and clairvoyants often attribute mystical powers to numbers simply because they do not understand the concept of RANDOMNESS.
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Here is a quote from Does 11.11.11 Have Anything to Do with Science?, Scientific America on, naturally, 11 Nov 2011.
“Numerological coincidences remain fascinating precisely because they can boast no general or cosmic meaning whatsoever,” (Stephen Jay) Gould explains in I Have Landed: the End of a Beginning in Natural History. The“eerie fascination” many people have with “coincidence and numerology” Gould attributes to the fact that people have “so thoroughly misunderstood probability.”
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THE CRAZY
Then there’s dealin’ with the crazies like pi, e, i, infinity and all those IRRATIONAL NUMBERS. Yep! Maths involves dealing with lots of crazies. (See Below.) But we can do it, mathspigs.
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BAD 1: There are LUCKY NUMBERS
WHAT 6 NUMBERS WOULD YOU USE IN A LOTTERY DRAW?
Birthdays, favourites, ages, lucky numbers ……? It doesn’t matter. The chance or probability is the same. There are no lucky numbers.
If you were selecting six numbers at random, however, would you pick 1,2,3,4,5,6?
What are the chances?
The chance or probability of 1,2,3,4,5 and 6 being selected in a 6 ball draw is THE SAME as any other combination of 6 numbers out of 49, which is 13,983,816.
Yet we see 1,2,3,4,5,6 as an UNLUCKY NUMBER combination for no reason.
This is the GAMBLER’s ERROR. There is no such thing as LUCKY NUMBERS or UNLUCKY NUMBERS.
Was Friday 11.11.11 more significant than, say, today 22.11.11 or in USA 11.22.11?
Ooooooo Magic!!!!! Lots of people thought 111111 was a LUCKY NUMBER.
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Mathspig writes for newspapers. One reader WHO turned 11 on 11.11.11 e-mailed me asking if I’d like to write an article about her.
Firstly, there is no special meaning in 11.11.11. It just looks pretty and, in reality, her birth date is 11.11.2011. Ooops!
Secondly, in the UK 1,490 kids turned 11 on 11.11.11. In Victoria, Australia, 160 kids turned 11 on 11.11.11. Not so special then. Not so LUCKY.
Just because a number has a pretty pattern doesn’t make it MAGICAL.
CRAZY 111111
There are, however, some Fabulously FREAKY Numbers.
Take 111111 for instance. It is an absolutely fabulous number. The Math Less Travelled blog explains that numbers of the following sort:
1
11
111
1111
are called (Base 10) REPUNITS.
….. REPUNITS …
And you can prove that every Prime except 3 or 5 are factors of a repunit. This is UNIVERSITY MATHS so you better go to THE MATH LESS TRAVELLED Blog for this proof, meanwhile here is a sample:
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How heavy is $500,000 dollars?
Derren Brown is a UK mentalist, magician, hypnotist and maths guru. He’s awesome. He shows audiences how a lack of understanding maths, especially probability, leads to misinterpreting the facts.
Mentalist Derren Brown devises a foolproof gambling system. He sends a girl , Kadisha, the number of a winning horse in race to be run the next day. It wins. He sends her the winning horse and race number 4 more times. She ends up with winnings close to £ 1000 before the final race. Derren convinces her to borrow money for the last bet. She does. She places £4,000 on a horse. Did it win?????
