Amazing Maths

"Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo" (rustyvandura)
08/06/2019 at 21:52 • Filed to: None

This is presented in three parts and is very clever teaching style for, I would guess, middle schoolers. Enjoy.

DISCUSSION (12)

TheRealBicycleBuck > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
08/06/2019 at 22:31

I guess I’ve the mind of a middle schooler for I enjoyed them very much. I’ve seen some of her stuff before, but I’d forgotten about it.

All of it reminds me of part of my dissertation work. It turns out there are a number of ways to measure patterns in nature and there are relationships between the patterns and phenomenon like flooding. Some of the cooler measurements are fractional dimension, contagion, and lacunarity. Those are usually used to look at how the landscape changes over time. Funny thing is that I was first introduced to the concepts while measuring bone structure through a microscope!

Thanks for posting these!

ttyymmnn > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
08/06/2019 at 22:57

That was cool, but damn, she tires me out. On late night TV back in the 80s (or maybe 90s) there was a televised physics classroom from Cal Poly SLO. I used to watch it, not because any of it really made sense, but because it was just so damned cool to see how things worked and that there was a way to describe--and predict--all of it. As for these videos, it’s fascinating to watch it all work, but I wouldn’t want to have to figure it out on my own. Still, I’m going to share these with the family.

gettingoldercarguy > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
08/07/2019 at 00:14

Did I just see the movie pi again?

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > TheRealBicycleBuck
08/07/2019 at 07:37

I’m glad you enjoyed them. I believe I’ve heard of this woman also and while I’m not nearly as skilled as she is, and I lack the PhD that I assume she must have, she approaches it much as I would and understands well the mind of an adolescent. As it happens, the video was shared with me by a rising 8th grader who is so clever that we sit and explore number theory together, music theory, and so on, with me as his private academic coach.

You’ve a PhD? What was / is your research / interest area?

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > ttyymmnn
08/07/2019 at 07:42

It’s the beauty of these that she makes it so appealing, and it’s all out there like a big rock candy mountain for a young person to latch onto any little bit of it.

I only have a bachelor’s degree in math which, as you know, a bachelor’s is really not much more than a high school diploma in the academic scheme of things. But the topic of these is number theory , and perhaps you noticed that she emphasized that someone might wanna be a number theorist , back in Part One. Number theory is absolutely my favorite thing and it’s the thing I spend the most effort upon in my classroom. I’m not about to go count Fib numbers or Lewis numbers on pine cones, but some kid might. Just like the pitch/music theory stuff I’ve dragged you along with recently, I am determined to introduce just a smidgen of that in my classroom this year in the event that even one out of my 120 students all day remembers some aspect of it. I certainly would’ve. Might not have inspired me to earn a DMA, but I’d have squirreled it away for sure.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > gettingoldercarguy
08/07/2019 at 07:43

Not Pi , but Phi .

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > ttyymmnn
08/07/2019 at 07:44

And the notion of one phith of 360 degrees make me go all quivery inside. Like, seriously. To me, that’s the kernel of the whole thing. And I suppose it is...

ttyymmnn > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
08/07/2019 at 07:46

O ne of my boys asked why they have to do learn some obscure thing in school, be it math, science, whatever, if they are never going to use it again. I said, first, that there’s no way yet to know what they are gong to be doing later in life, and, second, so many of these topics are taught not go teach mastery but to find kids who are interested in them and who then go on to master them on their own later in life. As we used to say at an old job, “Nobody will ever buy something they can’t imagine.”

ttyymmnn > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
08/07/2019 at 11:09

What fascinated me was how both the Fibonacci series and the Lucas Series can both be used to derive Phi. Mind blown.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > ttyymmnn
08/07/2019 at 11:38

I did not catch that Lucas was also phi-derived. I’ll have to take another look. This is the same sort of thing that pi does, only more involved.

gettingoldercarguy > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
08/07/2019 at 13:17

Yeah, the Fibonacci sequence and phi are discussed in that flick.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > gettingoldercarguy
08/07/2019 at 16:44

Why I shared it...