Golden mean

I was never that excited about the golden mean (supposedly the ratio in the Acropolis of its width to its height) despite its link to Fibonacci's sequence, which is awesome.  Steven Strogatz explores the golden mean here, especially focusing on its relationship to pentagons and pentagrams.  Devil worshippers and military-industrial complex conspiracists, you're golden.

It's always worth checking out his bibliography.  It will take you to this movie about Fibonacci, which of course pretends that real nautiluses (nautili?) follow the golden mean.  But watch it anyway.

Maybe you aren't unpopular

Steven Strogatz new column explains why your friends have more friends than you do.

Almost everyone's friends have more friends than they do.  Sounds paradoxical?  Mess with your intuition?  That's the signal that the math behind it might just be interesting.

Prezi top 10

Ten(ish) uses for Prezi

1. Provide instructions for a procedure, which students can look at when they want, and at the details they care about.
2. Introducing a new concept, with an overview for everyone, and different levels of detail to provide differentiated instruction.
3. Encoding a learning game.
4. Controlling access to the words, to enforce the timing of reading along.
5. Assign a project in which students create a Prezi that explains how they solved a problem.
6. A group project, in which all the students are able to make their own edits to the Prezi they're creating.
7. Taking another boring powerpoint presentation and making it rotate and scale.  (Of limited use, but something has to be better than powerpoints.)
8. Using the features of Prezi to teach the mathematical concept of translation.
9. Using the features of Prezi to teach the mathematical concept of rotation.
10. Using the features of Prezi to teach the mathematical concept of scale.

Thanks to wildscribblings for this link.  See-through airplanes!  I can't wait.

U of Utah Math Circle

The U has a program for students interested in Math.  It meets Wednesdays 4-6 pm, starting October 10.  Any student who wants to sign up can go to http://www.math.utah.edu/mathcircle/app.html.  It sounds cool to me, and it's free.  WooHoo!

My first Prezi

A presentation about MESA's prosthetic arm challenge.

Steven Strogatz restarts his math blog for the NY times.  This time, he's working through the links between math and ourselves.  This entry discusses the topology of fingerprints and cowlicks.  Woo Hoo!