Friday 20 March 2009

Things I Learned at the Carnival

They just posted the newest "Math Teachers at Play", a math education carnival, this time hosted by Kate at f(t). There are lots of good reasons you should visit if you are a teacher of math at any level, a student, someone just interested in math, or just the curious kind of person who drops by my blog.
They started this time with a link to my post on centroids, "Just an Average Point"; which proves they must have wonderful stuff...
Ok, if that isn't enough to convince you, there are all kinds of cool things I picked up in just a few moments on a couple of the links... Did you know???
33 is the largest number that is not a sum of distinct triangular numbers. Which made me wonder, can you get them all with distinct triangular numbers using addition AND subtraction???? Haven't checked myself yet, but curious.

34 is the smallest number with the property that it and its neighbors have the same number of divisors. Hmmm? That's three in a row... can you find the smallest TWO consecutive numbers that have the same number of factors (ok,gotta be bigger than 2...

40 is the only number whose letters are in alphabetical order.... which has GOT to be a great trivia question. It also got me wondering...are there numbers in Spanish, Greek, Russian, Tagalog... ???? that are in alphabetical order, and is there a language that there is not ANY number that is spelled in alphabetical order? Ok, Help me out here readers!!!!!

And besides, there was this great "space invaders" cartoon... and if you are too young to know what space invaders was...well, heck, you are just TOO YOUNG.

1 comment:

Nate said...

I can't help but wonder if some languages do not have an 'alphabetical order'. Some languages have many more than 26 letters, and in Hindi for example, there are variations and combinations of letters that might be more effectively organized in categories than in a memorized (and arbitrary) order.