This year’s first Bay Area Mathematical Adventures (BAMA) was with Dan Goldston on twin primes. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand the majority of his presentation. He used Mathematica to create scrolling, animated representations of prime numbers. This was pretty cool, although he didn’t get into much of the actual formulas. Not that I would be able to understand it, anyhow. This level of math is above me. I did like his mini-talk on “45 minutes of fame” though–he showed us an article in several newspapers, including the San Jose Mercury News. He was even mentioned on Slashdot back in March 2003, for a “breakthrough in prime number theory.”
Tag Archive for 'math'
I got a shiny new cell phone yesterday! It’s a Samsung A670. Pics:
- WPG2 CANNOT LOCATE GALLERY2 ITEM BY ** WPG2 CANNOT LOCATE GALLERY2 ITEM BY ** WPG2 CANNOT LOCATE GALLERY2 ITEM BY ** WPG2 CANNOT LOCATE GALLERY2 ITEM BY *
My number is pretty interesting, although PhoneSpell doesn’t have any mnemonics for it.
Now see if you can guess the number. Here are some clues:
- It is in the form: (408) xyx-zxjk, where each unique letter represents a unique digit in the number.
- z minus one is prime. (mod 10)
- x is equal to y raised to the number of times x occurs in the phone number. (mod 10)
- z is one more than y. (mod 10)
- j is one more than x. (mod 10)
- k is one more than j. (mod 10)
- The cube root of x is even. (mod 10)
Got it? Leave a comment with the answer and send me a text message, too. :-)
Here’s a problem that was presented to me in Math Enrichment. It’s main purpose is to guide an investigation of infinite series.
Part 1:
The cookie monster sneaks into the kitchen and eats half a cookie; on the second day he comes in and eats half of what remains of the cookie from the first day; on the third day he comes in and eats half of what remains from the second day. If the cookie monster continues this process for seven days, how much of the cookie has he eaten? How much is left?
Part 2:
Problem: Share 6 cookies among 7 people. Restrictions: You cannot use 6/7 or any non-reduced form of that fraction. Find a way to use the sum of an infinite series.
(Obviously, the cookies must be divided equally.)
Today I found out my scores on the AMC-10 and California Mathematics League.
On the AMC-10 I got 111.5 out of possible 150 points, which is significatly higher than lots of other people in the class (including 8th graders). The other 7th graders (namely Tony, Felix, and Timothy) beat me by a few points, and all the top 8th graders (Steven Liao, Daiwei, Patricia, Archit, etc.) scored close to perfect!
CAML: I only got 36 out of 40. [shy] I won’t get the paper back until 2 weeks later. Something interesting…the contest designers say that anyone with a score of 15 or above is “to be commended”, so I guess that’s everyone in our class! LOL
I wonder what I got on the previous Math FAX? One of the problems asked for “the area of the cylinder, in terms of [tex]pi[/tex]“. Surface area or volume?