Miscellaneous
Puppy, collar, bone \”solution\”
Hello mathematicians, puzzlers, and other curious people! This video shows my work on a puzzle posted last week. As you can see, we can get different answers in some puzzles, depending on how we interpret them. That\’s OK! Just make sure you take notes on what assumptions you make in solving a puzzle so that…
Vertex Form Proof
Hello mathematicians, puzzlers, and other curious people! Following up on this previous video, I\’m using calculus to come up with a proof of the vertex form of a quadratic function. Calc You Later! Side note: If any of those calculus steps, like the chain rule, were hard for you to follow, you can learn Calc…
Puppy, collar, bone
Hello mathematicians, puzzlers, and other curious people! For your midweek enjoyment, here\’s one of those picture-value puzzles. Mind the last line carefully! I\’ll post my work once folks have had a chance to try on their own. Calc You Later! Update: This post has a sequel in which I work out a solution.
Graph Doodling
This post previously appeared in the Mathematical Musings free class on Teachable. As part of my goal of becoming platform-independent, the Mathematical Musings are becoming blog posts. Hello, mathematicians, puzzlers, and other curious people! As you probably guessed from the title, I\’m musing about graphs today, but you might be surprised by what I mean…
Testing Patterns
Hello mathematicians, puzzlers, and other curious people! This video contains three conjectures, one proof, and one counterexample (and therefore one open conjecture), based on this previous post. The important idea of what we did here is if we can find a formula that\’s equivalent to how we\’re coming up with some numbers, and that formula…
Square Numbers
Hello mathematicians, puzzlers, and other curious people! For those who don\’t already know, when you take a number and multiply it by itself, the product is called a square number because we can use it to draw a square neatly, such as these numbers: Sometimes you will hear people refer to numbers as \”___ squared,\”…
Puzzles and Formulas
Hello mathematicians, puzzlers, and other curious people! This is what I came up with by exploring relationships between numbers in yesterday\’s puzzle. Like I mentioned, there are still some directions available for further exploration, so I don\’t think we\’re done yet with this puzzle and ones like it. But, for now, Calc You Later!
A simple-looking puzzle
Hello mathematicians, puzzlers, and other curious people! Similar to crosswords but with numbers, intersecting math facts can form puzzles. Here\’s an example. While completing this puzzle is straightforward for most mathematicians, setting up more puzzles of the same kind is more complicated. For example, if the middle number were 2 instead of 3 and the…