How should you figure out your profit? If you have an item that you are selling, should you price it at 25% over its cost to you, or should you price it so that your margin is 25%. Many people think that their profit will be the same either way. Is that true?
I do not know who, when, or where this iconic mathematical representation was developed. It is, however, one of the most powerful and ubiquitous of all mathematical images, and I think the most important. It is taught to 2nd graders and used by STEAM professionals. It is called a function machine, and it represents the …
Students are tasked to build a times table in just two steps. They have to learn to use absolute as well as relative addressing to do, and the Lab takes them through using them. We encourage students to work with just a row or a column rather than with the table as a whole because …
“The rapid growth of computing and applications has helped cross-fertilize the mathematical sciences, yielding an unprecedented abundance of new methods, theories, and models. Examples from statistical science, core mathematics, and applied mathematics illustrate these changes, which have both broadened and enriched the relation between mathematics and science. No longer just the study of number and …
It was one of the most amazing visions of the future ever made. In 1965 Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, proposed a law governing the future of computing. He originally proposed that the number of components on a chip would double every year. Later he revised that law to doubling every two …
It caught my eye, this headline/story posted on EdWeek recently. Seems there was a panel at a conference that was supposed to debate what they obviously thought would be an attention grabbing, contentious, and controversial topic. Their conclusion: NO! All I can say is: “You have got to be kidding!” Now, I know that textbooks …
Pennies to Heaven is a Fermi Problem, basically a “headmath” experiment. Fermi Problems, originally developed by Enrico Fermi, one of the greatest experimental and theoretical physicists of the 20th century, are real-world estimation problems. So we ask, “If we had a stack of pennies as tall as the Empire State Building, how big a room …
NCTM Annual Conference April 15-18 We were thrilled to have had over 250 people come to our session and with their response and questions. As we promised, here is the PDF and PowerPoint that we presented. We look forward to implementing the suggestions and to seeing the results as you try What if Math with …
When I was a kid, Sundays in the summer were car washing days. The stores were closed. The roads were generally quiet. And we took out the hose and the pail, filled them with water and dishwashing soap then rubbed, scrubbed, and waxed the family car…or later our own car…beautiful again. Sundays have already substantially …
Create, manipulate, and explore triangles in this live interactive spreadsheet. On the surface, a triangle is being drawn on a graph, but the real magic lies in the formulas used to make this spreadsheet work.
