In every volcano disaster movie from Volcano (1997) with Tommy Lee Jones to Dante’s Peak (1997) with Pierce Brosnan someone somewhere tries to out run a lava flow.
Is this possible? (See movie cliché busted by maths here.)
Now a lava flow from Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano is threatening tiny town of Pahoa, Hawaii again. (below).
You will find excellent information about the Kilauea and other volcanoes at the
As the temperature of lava exceeds 10000 C there are very few ways to stop lava. According to the Taylor Kate Brown SMH (10 SEPT 2014) options include:
Bombing
Blasting (it with cold water)
Barricading it
Or adding concrete.
What if you are on your own.
Can you out run lava?
Lets do the maths.
Lava from Kilauea travels 17 yards per hour so the lava velocity is:
The Maths Mystery Box is a great treasure chest to take into maths classes. It can be used an an extension exercise or to engage some disengaged students.
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The IDEA is to use concrete objects and write a maths problem to go with the object. (See examples below) The appeal of the MATHS MYSTERY BOX is that it involves CONCRETE THINKING, sort of. All text books involve ABSTRACT thinking, which some students do not like.
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A student picks a maths problem from the box. A problem can be simple or complex. But it is not just a maths problem. The student gets to hold an object in their hand. They have to devise their own method of approach. And they must be resourceful. ie. use equipment at hand eg. their phone as a stop watch. Students like this activity. Even maths teachers like this activity as Mathspig found out at her workshop in Hamburg.
One reason why students think maths is a waste of time is because they do not see it in their world. It’s not just middle school students. We are all maths blind.
Here is the challenge. At the beginning of your next maths class:
Ask your students what ‘mathsy’ thing they have on them and see what happens. Mathspig started her ICME 13 Workshop with that question and maths teachers from around the world struggled to answer. Here is what happened.
More ideas below.
Note: I missed the significance of ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’ Quote. It was from the great mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, 1776.
*Flooring: Wood (parallel lines), carpet (tessellations), coefficient of friction (Don’t want people to slip in the wet).
*Windows, doors: Hinges (Fulcrum, Effort as a Hyperbolic function), opening/closing door is an equation of a circle, angles, fly screens (pattern), windows (pulleys sometimes), handles (knob or lever impacts on effort)
Table/desk/chair: Based on statistics to fit majority of students.
In Australia we don’t get too carried away with 14 March aka Pi Day aka 3.14.16 because, unlike Americans, we do not write the date as 3/14/16. We prefer 14/3/16.
No problem.
Meanwhile Mathspig called her upcoming talk for the International Congress of Mathematical Education 2016 in Hamburg:
Then odd emails arrived relabelling my talk ‘…….. p-in-your-face funny!’
I thought it was a typo. Not so! The Germans, the Dutch and other European countries do not call π ‘Pi’, they call it ‘P’ or ‘Pee’ because ‘i’ is pronounced ‘ee’, for instance, in German. So I had called my great international maths talk Pee-in-your-face funny! And the German organising committee seemed happy enough with the title.
To be diplomatic and to avoid the attracting the wrong type of audience I’ve retitled my talk:
How many m&ms would kill a 14-year-old? Making middle-school maths real, relevant, deadly serious and ha^2 funny!
So Happy π Day English speakers and now, for a laugh, look at some of our Pi or Pee jokes through the eyes of, say, a German.
That’s because of the beer.
One whole day dedicated to pi.
It’s epic!
Mathematicians in love .., awwww!
So cute or they’re pissed.
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OK. ‘I 8 sum pi’ but adding the ‘delicous’ makes this weird for a German. D’Oh!
Very expensive bottle of pi.
Mmmm! Pecan pi.
Rabbit Pi must be a problem.
Dessert wine, maybe?
That’s, like, every day after a night out on the ‘piss’ as we so delicately call it in Australia.
You too can have tasty pi. I don’t know how and frankly, I don’t want to know.
In 2012 The New York Times ran an article by Andrew Hacker titled ‘Is Algebra Necessary?’ The argument was, basically, that too many students find algebra difficult and colleges in America use math results to screen students thus further disadvanting already disadvantaged students. The author had a point. eg. Of all who embark on higher education, only 58 percent end up with bachelor’s degrees. The main impediment to graduation: freshman math.
Perhaps, algebra could be taught in a different way. Mathspig was inspired by New York Grade 3 teacher, Alycia Zimmerman, who uses Lego to teach fractions (See next post) and came up with the following examples.
In every volcano disaster movie from Volcano (1997) with Tommy Lee Jones to Dante’s Peak (1997) with Pierce Brosnan someone somewhere tries to out run a lava flow.
Is this possible? (See movie cliché busted by maths here.)
Now a lava flow from Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano is threatening tiny town of Pahoa, Hawaii. (below).
You will find excellent information about the Kilauea and other volcanoes at the
As the temperature of lava exceeds 10000 C there are very few ways to stop lava. According to the Taylor Kate Brown SMH (10 SEPT 2014) options include:
Bombing
Blasting (it with cold water)
Barricading it
Or adding concrete.
What if you are on your own.
Can you out run lava?
Lets do the maths.
Lava from Kilauea travels 17 yards per hour so the lava velocity is:
Reading Undiluted Hocus-Pocus, the autobiography of Martin Gardener, mathematician and magician (He wrote the puzzle column for scientific America for years), Mathspig was bemused to read that statistician William Feller lived on Random Road in Princeton.
Mathspig totally confused Google Maps by searching for so many Maths streets, roads, drives, lanes and crescents. Mr Google began to think Mathspig was stuck on Infinity Street or lost at Cartesian Place.
What place boasts the most mathematical street names in the world (so far):
1. Paris
There are nearly 100 Parisian streets, squares, boulevards etc. named after mathematicians and not necessarily French mathematicians.
Street names include:
Rue Laplace
Rue Bernoulli
Rue Newton
There is, surprisingly, no street named after Fourier in Paris. But the street on which he was born in Auxerre has been renamed after this great mathematician.
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2. Salisbury, South Australia
Surprisingly, the most ‘mathsy’ place Mathspig has discovered so far is an outer suburb of Adelaide, south Australia. Maths street names include:
Equation Rd
Parallell Ave
Chord Rd
Log Rd
Tangent Ave
Quadrant Ave
Meridian Rd
Degree Rd
Decimal Rd
Latitude Rd
Co-ordinate RD
Fibonacci in Budafest Not by name, by design.
3. New York, NY, USA
You can’t get lost in New York. It is a grid city.
Eg. 812 East 23rd St means No. 12, block 8 East of Broadway.
There is a Sine Rd in Auburn New York,
but it’s not this one. Pity!
Here is a fun Maths exercise to get Middle School students thinking about maths.
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Ans. 1. Massey, NZ. 2. TRIANGLE. 3. State Ave 4. 0.7 miles, 1.1 km. 5. It has 3 right angles 6. 0.4 miles, 0.6 km. 7. No. The triangle is not a right angle triangle. 8. David W Carter Hight School) 9. Only 2 ARITHMETIC CR, Landon, SC and ARITHMETIC Dr, Salem, MA. 10. O.4 miles, 0.6 km.
The study showed that “Men whose red meat intake put them in the top 20 per cent consumption band were 22 per cent more likely to die of cancer in the 10 years of the study, compared to men whose intake was in the lowest 20 per cent. For women, there was a 20 per cent increase in risk.”
The problem is big meat eaters tend also to be big drinkers, smokers, obese and the rest. This study has tried to separate out meat eating from other unhealthy lifestyle choices using the Cox Regression. Mathematical wizardry has produced these numbers but they don’t mean much.
If the study used a control group of drinking, smoking, obese vegans then compaing mortality rates over 10 years would be would be interesting. But where do you find half a million of them????????
Meanwhile any survey or study of a self-selecting group (eg. newspaper polls among readers) or a pre-existing group (eg. a church group, college students, yacht club, rock ‘n roll club) produces biased and therefore meaningless results.
eg. 9 out of 10 dentists who are paid to say they recommend Oral B toothbrushes is useless information, a study of paid jerks, really.
Look for a RTC or Randomised Controlled Trial.
Any study that begins a ‘trial of college students found’ (eg. psychology trials) is a BIASED SAMPLE. Look at the lifestyle of college students. How many people in the general population wear beer hats to parties? If you asked 10 beer hat wearing college students their opinion on Oral B toothbrushes they might not even recall the purpose of a toothbrush!
In every volcano disaster movie from Volcano (1997) with Tommy Lee Jones to Dante’s Peak (1997) with Pierce Brosnan someone somewhere tries to out run a lava flow.
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