The imaginary number of the beast

Let Live Search Do Your Algebra

Great idea from Lifehacker.com : Let Live Search do your algebra. I guess most of you are familiar with the fact that google search (even the search bar in Firefox) can do simple calculations and unit conversions. Microsoft’s latest effort goes to eleven though. It is capable of solving simple algebra problems. With symbols. So it’s one point for microsoft. Firefox and Google had thousands of points from before, but this means they are catching up 🙂

Weekend before pi

Thanks, Ola, for this link.  Having endured a whole year of my mathematics teaching, you still seem rather obsessed with pi…! 😀 A fun video here, to round of the week before pi-day.

Music That Makes You Dumb?

As research comes and goes, even at the cheap researcher what follow is remarkbly cheap…

This page claims (not too seriously) that good scores on the SAT are related to listening to Beethoven, shile Beyonce sits at the other end of the spectrum. A bit suprising that jazz followers score lower than hip hoppers…

Beer Geometry – CollegeHumor Video

Kind of funny – I guess this merges the need for weekend and the work with mathematics…

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1735367

Pedagoguery Software: Poly

A great little freeware to show off today! As a mathematics teacher, and frequent user of whiteboards/smartboards, I am always

looking for nice programs or web sites to use interactively. This is one particularily good program that does just one thing, but does it good. It shows you the most common and a lot of the uncommon geometric solids. You can (use your hands on the smartboard to) zoom in and out on the solids, open them up and crunch them back together again. You can print the layout nets for each solid if you want to make your own physical model. For instance, have your students make footballs (I am talking soccer, not the “other sort” of football, where they mostly cheat by using their hands) from pentagons and hexgons. Solids can be shown transparent or…well..solid.

Go download a free version at http://www.peda.com/poly/

Happy new year all!

Well, the academic life just started on Friday, and I love this period of a few days where you actually can prepare  yourself, read some of the stuff you should’ve read ages ago and perhaps even tidy up the office. Just a little bit.

I got this question about my profile photo (not the contrived serious one in the About Me page, but the small one on comments). The reason I love this photo (even if it is of myself) is that it shows myself learning some mathematical facts and connections on my Amstrad CPC 6128 computer. Also, it’s a rather amusing picture of myself around one of my favorite pass-times, with a lot of nostalgia on the walls… (A dog long gone, pop stars, a terrific hair cut, badges and medals, Bon Jovi, etc… ah.. the memories…). The Amstrad didn’t have a blue screen of death, it actually had a blue screen of life. With yellow text. Unfortunately blue (and red) was a colour not very suited for television sets, and the blue tended to blur so much it was hard to read blue text or text on a blue background…

Amstrad CPC 6128 - the wonder machine!

I did not set out to learn mathematics on this computer, but it somehow forced itself into my motivation. I remember learning about sines and cosines in order to plot the circumference of a circle. If a teacher have told me this is what I should do, it wouldn’t have been half as fun. I remember learning about slopes in order to draw stars on the screen. This happened several years before sines and slopes entered my syllabus. I also subscribed to this magazine, named Amstrad Action, and there one could find listings of programs in Basic, which could be typed in and saved on floppies or cassettes. (Do you remember the sound of those tapes? You could listen to it, and after perfectioning your ear, you could say just by listening to the signal hiss whether the software was properly loaded or not.) Of course there was no hard drive, but the machine would ship with an enormous 128 Kb of memory. Not quite enough for everybody, according to Bill Gates, but nevertheless – endless possibilities in the eighties! One of the programs I typed in was a short program that would allow you to play with coefficients of quadratics. It would solve the equations and draw the graphs, and this was before we had ever heard of graphic calculators. I felt like I was on the edge of technical evolution… Anyhow, this “insight from within”, has been valuable to me when meeting the quadratics (and other functions) later on, and the Amstrad have also pointed me towards ways of treating my own students and pupils.

I later read Seymour Papert‘s “The Gears of My Childhood“, and things started to clear up a bit… I highly recommend the book “Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful ideas” where I read the mentioned article in the foreword, to anyone interested in the teaching and learning, particularily of mathematics.

Fun Math Blog

I came across a blog called Fun Math Blog when searching the Internet for different blogs about mathematics. I must confess I did this during working hours, so I am not really sure whether it should pass as work or leisure… Now, the author of the Fun math blog invited visitors to exchange short reviews, so here goes! Sol is mathematician who writes mostly (well, almost exclusively) about mathematics. I have followed his blog for some months and can highly recommend his posts – and I must admit they come out more often than mine! Since I am working in higher education, educating teachers, I feel a little bit sad that I don’t go so much into the content of mathematics anymore. It’s always there, but there just doesn’t seem to be enough time to get really involved with mathematical problems. That is why I especially like his articles section. There are lots of things to think about in there, for instance when working with math anxiety or other didactical topics.

Since I also love to read stuff where mathematics enters the stage within media and culture, I have to forward this link from his last entry. I am fond of things like these: http://www.math.harvard.edu/~knill/mathmovies/index.html.
On my Norwegian-only mathematics site I also have a tag for videos with some mathematical content or theme.

Converting Pi to binary: Don’t do it

I haven’t really written much about mathematics. And later I might. For now we are still on the comical note… I stumbled (literally, by using stumbleupon) across a site that claims it’s a good thing we can’t write out pi in binary numbers. If you do, you end up with all finite strings of 0’s and 1’s that is possible. That means, converted to letters, you have infringed copyrights of all written material known to man, you have insulted all religions and all of their fictual characters, you have done all kinds of espionage and written a DVD-cracking program (courtesy of DVD-Jon). Read a bit more over at

Converting Pi to binary: Don’t do it@Everything2.com.

Norwegian GeoGebra Institute

Image via Wikipedia

NGI, Norsk GeoGebra Institutt (Norwegian geoGebra Institute) was founded this year. Located at NTNU, the university of Trondheim. This institute is aiming to be a gathering point for all activities related to GeoGebra. If you don’t already know this excellent piece of software, take at look at the GeoGebra tag to the right to see some of my older posts, or check it ouf free on the official site, http://www.geogebra.org.

The institute will facilitate courses and seminars, online and on campus, and the first courses are already being planned and starting out. Also, you can be certified for being an instructor at four different levels by attending courses and seminars.