Lorelei Boschman
www.wired.com/tag/quanta-magazine/
Go to www.wired.com/tag/quanta-magazine/ and consider some truly interesting scenarios:
• “The Math of How Crickets, Starlings, and Neurons Sync Up”
• “Is the Universe a Hologram? Maybe! This Math Trick Shows How”
• “Colorado Tried a New Way to Vote: Make People Pay—Quadratically”
• “The Sensible Math of Knocking Over Absurdly Large Dominoes”
• “The Best Way for a Mouse to Escape a Cat, According to Math”
• “A Huge Achievement in Math Shows the Limits of Symmetries”
The article that brought me to this website was “Mathematicians Discover the Perfect Way to Multiply,” by Kevin Hartnett (www.wired.com/story/mathematicians-discover-the-perfect-way-to-multiply/). This article intrigued me. After all our multiplying through the ages, there is now a best way to multiply for very large numbers. The article demonstrates how this works and explains the mathematics behind it. Imagine only 2n steps instead of n2 steps, and think of the neat classroom applications! The article has been reprinted in this issue of delta-K.
A search of “math” at www.wired.com/tag/quanta-magazine/ brought up 3,673 interesting and curious math articles. Adding more descriptors will focus your search on one of your particular topics of interest. Many of the articles are linked to science, which could further promote STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) topics.
“Mathematicians Discover the Perfect Way to Multiply” was originally printed in Quanta Magazine (www.quantamagazine.org). What a wealth of mathematical ideas! Again, put “math” into the search bar and see what shows up. I can see many of you mathematicians out there enjoying these diverse, interesting and mind-stimulating topics and articles.
Lorelei Boschman received her bachelor of education and master of education degrees from the University of Lethbridge. She is the education coordinator at Medicine Hat College, facilitating the four-year bachelor of education program (a collaborative degree program with Mount Royal University) and instructing a variety of postsecondary courses with a mathematics focus. Previously, she taught K–8 at a rural school and spent 21 years teaching high school mathematics. Mathematics education is her passion and life work, and she has been involved in many local and provincial initiatives.
