Math Monday
Live in Zoom, Mondays 2pm PDT
Keep your math brain humming year with a free half hour of math games every Monday, live in Zoom. Perfect for kids ages 8-14.
What reads the same right side up and upside down?
Ambigrams are words written that read in more than one way. Ambigrams are a great way to introduce kids to symmetry and problem solving, and bring artistic creativity into math learning.
Watch the video above to learn about the different types of ambigrams, and learn to create your own ambigrams.
Click below to get Ambigram activities you can print and use in your home or classroom.
Slide show • Handout (symmetry puzzles) • Thinking Upside down activity book
In Memoriam John Conway
John Conway, one of the greatest contemporary mathematicians, and certainly the most entertaining, recently passed away. Wherever John was it was a mathematical party, and you were invited.
As my tribute to John, I have spelled his name in his Game of Life (not to be confused with the Hasbro board game), a remarkably deep “cellular automaton”. In this design, each letter is a pattern that repeats after some number of moves, that number here being 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 14. To learn more about Life, see this Numberphile interview, read Siobhan Robert’s biography Genius at Play, or watch his friends remember him.
Slide Shows
Talks
Articles
Fixing Math Education
Math education is a leaky boat that is engulfed in flames and sailing in the wrong direction. There is so much wrong that it is hard to know where to start. And fixing just one problem won’t save the ship…
A manifesto for universal math literacy
I love math. I hate the way it is taught. If you feel similarly, and want to do something about, then this manifesto is for you.
The Mathematics of Ambigrams
Ambigrams are words that read in more than one way — like WOW, which is MOM upside down. Only a few words are natural ambigrams, but if you stretch the letter shapes, almost any word can become an ambigram.
Ambigrams
Origami
SYMMETRY. Reflection about a vertical axis. INSPIRATION. Commissioned by high school mathematics teacher David Masunaga for a talk about origami, and published in Peter Engel’s book Origami from Angelfish to Zen. STORY. This design was created at the request of David Masunaga, who used it in a talk about origami to illustrate the concept of grafting one construction onto part […]
Half Words Handout
HALF WORDS Each design on this page is really half of a word. Can you figure out what each design says? To read a design, take two copies of this page, place one copy on top of the other, and slide them around until the two copies of the design meet. Hold the papers up to […]
Joy to the World
Joy to the World SYMMETRY. 180° rotation. INSPIRATION. Originally drawn as a family holiday card in 1985. To create the angular letters, I cut shapes out of construction paper and traced them into my computer.
Math Magic
Math Magic SYMMETRY. Metamorphosis from the digits 0123456789 to the title. INSPIRATION. Video title lettering for Math Magic, a video plus book course by human calculator and math evangelist Scott Flansburg. STORY. I first met Scott in 1996 when we were both presenting at the annual MathCounts award ceremony. MathCounts is a national mathematics competition for middle school students that […]