NAME DATE BAND

EXPLORE MATHEMATICS: PART IIADV PRECALCULUS | PACKER COLLEGIATE INSTITUTE

Last quarter, you had a chance to investigate a number of different things in mathematics that intrigued you. Architecture, math art, statistics of women going into STEM fields, Benford’s law, and a zillion other things. I loved reading what you guys were discovering. I learned a lot. I was inspired by your findings.

If you are interested in participating in a more concentrated version of Explore Math in the fourth quarter, you can. This is part two. You’ve done a smattering of small explorations. If you’re interested, you can do up to two more in depth explorations. Although I may make exceptions for something like a math-art project, I would like for your explorations to:

Be written as a newspaper article, where you are going to be a science/math journalist trying to explain something fascinating in mathematics to a lay audience. Your goal is to make something you find neat to be interesting and understandable to someone else.

That’s the main goal. More specifically:

It should draw on at least three sources (which can be websites, articles, videos) which are cited (or linked to) at the end of the article

It should have an awesome title and a solid lede (the introductory section of a news story that is intended to bring the reader in)

It should have some images to bring some of the ideas or people to life You should try to come up with your own descriptions or analogies (instead of cribbing from your

sources) to explain the mathematics (if your article is focusing on a mathematical idea) You should try to get the mathematics across without writing a textbook teaching the mathematics.

You want to keep your eyes on the big picture – to make the reader interested and understand what you’re writing about

It should be well-written It should be 800+ words

If you don’t have a good idea of what you’re looking to do, read some New York Times articles about mathematics to get a sense of what you should strive for. There are so many things to write about. Just make sure it is something you find interesting! (I actually had typed about over 20 suggestions, and then decided to delete them. The mathematical world is your oyster!)

You can get ideas from all those sites you explored. You can talk to people you know who love math about their favorite thing in mathematics – that could lead you to some cool discoveries. Reddit math always has interesting discussions. There’s the math stack exchange. There’s me (I can help you find an idea/topic!). There’s finding out about the history of something you enjoy in math (e.g. when did imaginary numbers enter the lexicon of mathematics, and why?) Basically, so so so so so much!

Grading:

I want you to do this because you’re interested in it. I want it to encourage you to carve out time to do something that you’re interested in, if you want to. It’s totally optional. If you do it, I can have it count as an additional mini-assessment for the quarter. The reason this could be beneficial is because we do not have many assessments this quarter.

Each article will be worth 12 points, and you can write up to two articles. It will be graded on the criteria listed above. You are welcome to show me drafts and to get suggestions for improvement!

Before you embark on one of these, please speak with me with a specific idea for what your article will be on (so don’t just come to me and say ‘fractals’… do a little bit of legwork and let me know about about fractals you want to explain!). I then might know of some resources/websites that might be helpful for you!

And if you have an alternative idea (e.g. a math art project – maybe finding beautiful polar graphs, reading a popular math book and writing a book review, analyzing an interesting and rich math problem, doing an in-depth interview with a mathematician, researching the proof of some theorem/formula/idea) for something you are just interested in doing, just let me know and we can talk about it. My main goal is that you pursue something you want to pursue.

The deadline for submitting them to me is going to be on Friday, May 23rd. (This is the last day of classes before the review days.)

In addition to bringing me a hard copy in class, I also would like you to dropbox it with the following file name:

ExploreMath_Hull_Submission6.docxExploreMath_Hull_Submission7.docx

[In other words, a continuation of the same naming system we used before.]