SamizdatMath

On September 18th, 2015, New York City standup comedian Matt Little recorded a video of a rat dragging a slice of pizza down the stairs at the First Avenue L train station in Manhattan. On September 21st, Little uploaded the video to his Instagram and YouTube accounts with a bemusing description comparing the rodent to Master Splinter from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (shown below). Within the first 24 hours, the video garnered over two million views. This is an investigation into the perime

If you can find another mathematical investigation into NYC pizza that is more complete than this, then I advise you to buy it immediately. This has taken me several years to research, write, proofread. You will learn the meaning of the word cornicione and why it is very important when talking about pizza. You will learn about the optimal size of a pizza to buy. This resource will save you lots of money in the future.

Are you teaching the quadratic formula to your students? Are you teaching it the same way you learned it in high school? Or maybe college? Or maybe on the street somewhere? Then you're probably teaching it WRONG AF. It's okay: I've been teaching the quadratic formula WRONG AF for decades. I didn't know it, but I was. It wasn't until one day I was working with a group of my college students and made a mistake that I had a realization: we've been teaching the quadratic formula WRONG AF for decades

This activity uses the results of the 2016 Presidential Election, as well as all the previous US Elections, to determine if it was, as one ignoramus called it "a landslide." By examining previous election results based on their electoral college and "popular" vote, students will see for themselves using factual data that "landslides" in US Presidential Elections are fairly unique events, and then decide for themselves using the actual facts as compiled by the US Government whether the results of

To quote Charles Dickens (from The Pickwick Papers) “What fresh misery is this?” This is what happens when you have time on your hands and you’re thinking to yourself, “well, how can I bring bles’sed torment unto my students this week?” Many (many) years ago I had a student in my sixth grade class (you probably had them) who would respond to any “do now” problem with a quick look and the brag “oh, this is so easy!” And then after fumbling his way through 3 or 4 methods, all featuring a lapse of

Do you want to know what the problem is with all that math you think you're "teaching?" It's missing something, and no, it's not "standards," or "aims" or "concision" or cryptocurrency. No, it's missing something far more important. Your math is missing "ambiguity." Let's look at how your textbook is probably teaching area and perimeter. It probably states the definition, and then gives a bunch of cruddy problems where you calculate the area and perimeter of a bunch of rectangles and then moves

Back in the 1980s (before most of you were born), the A & W hamburger restaurant chain tried to go head to head with McDonalds' new "quarter pounder" by creating and marketing a "⅓ pound hamburger." It was a spectacular flop. A research company hired to find the source of the problem found out that half of the people surveyed thought that there was less meat in a ⅓ lb. burger than a ¼ lb. burger because, well, "3 is less than 4." The burger was renamed the "Big Papi" and continued to be sold b

Here's the problem: There are 100 seats on an airplane and 100 people waiting to get on. The first person loses their boarding pass, so they take a random seat on the plane. If the next person finds their seat occupied, they take another random seat. If their seat is free, they sit in it. Question: What is the probability that the 100th person on the plane will sit in their assigned seat? Oh, sure, you can look up the answer and come up with some convoluted or excessively mathematical explanati

This is a seven part investigation into the carbon footprint of different kinds of food and diets. Investigation #1: What We Emit When We Eat: This is a list of 20 different foods, including meats, dairy, vegetables and grains and the amount of carbon released during their production. Students calculate the equivalent in miles driven by a car, as well as the amount of carbon released per ounce. Investigation #2: Students investigate the carbon footprint of three different meals. The first is a s

This is a collection of 36 factor riddles to help your students prepare to factor quadratic equations.

This is the best investigation you can find anywhere which links exponential growth with paper folding. It includes background information about the investigation, and uses charts and tables to keep track of how tall a piece of paper would be if you folded it in half up to 60 times. The activity works with both customary and metric units and has answer keys for both. This investigation also looks at the formula that was derived by Britney Gallivan, a high school junior who actually proved that

Here's another mathematics investigation straight out of the SamizdatMath laboratory. Yes, the same place which brought you " How to Hack Your Burrito," " What's the Best Way to Fit a 15' Fishing Pole in a 10' Box?" AND "WTF is Survivor Bias and Why Should I Care About It?" now brings you a complete investigation into the age old problem "what's the fastest way to cook 3 steaks in a pan that only holds 2 at a time?" This is a problem that has been circulating around, and it has a fun solution,

This is an activity that investigates the issue of gerrymandering from many different sides; it is not designed to indoctrinate your students into the idea that gerrymandering (or drawing any kind of electoral districts) is "good" or "bad." Rather, it looks at the idea at what are different forms of "fair" representation. By re-framing this as a Dingo vs. Raccoon issue, we can rise above partisan politics and see this as a philosophical argument about what "democracy" really looks like. The firs

First of all, it should not be called the "Pythagorean Theorem," because Pythagoras had nothing to do with inventing or discovering it. The Chinese knew about it hundreds of years before, and the Mesopotamians? Like 1300 years before! Zip Zap.... Okay, this is a really REALLY cool activity that uses the "Pythagorean" Theorem to solve a very important question: how can you ship an 11 foot fishing pole, when the shipping box can't be any more than 10 feet in length? Take some time to scratch you

This is a set of activities that uses the raw data from each state in the 2016 United States Presidential Election, including the number of votes for each candidate, the number of "eligible" voters and the number of voters who "did not vote." What students will find out that if "did not vote" was a candidate, it would have "won" by one of the largest landslides in history. This is based on data used on the following website: https://brilliantmaps.com/did-not-vote/ The first activity explains som

This is an activity that analyzes the legitimacy of the "electoral college" system of voting in the United States, and whether it really is based on "one person, one vote." It uses census data from 2010 to show that when it comes to influence on presidential elections, states with smaller populations have a disproportional effect on the outcomes. The activity begins by explaining the workings of the electoral college system, describing how each state gets one elector for each house member, plus

Think about it: the average American eats over 40 slices of pizza a year; if you live to be 80, and assuming you start at around 5 years old, this is 75 years of pizza x 40 slices per year, or 3,000 slices in your lifetime! Since this delicious food is such an important part of our life, doesn't it make sense that we understand everything there is about the economics of buying pizza? This is a series of activities that examines the economics of pizza in several different ways. First, it shows

Teach your students the importance of ratios and unit rates.

This is a detailed description of a "strategy" game anybody who can count up to 100 can play with their class and win each and every time. The rules will take about 45 seconds to describe, and within 3 minutes you will be able to keep an entire class occupied by the question, 'why does he/she/they keep on winning this game?" If you follow the instructions described in this activity, it should easily keep a class engaged, puzzled and frustrated for at least 45 minutes, usually longer. Your class

This is a winter themed variation of Silly Creatures Number Logic Puzzles, a fun little booklet that your students can put together in about 3 minutes and features 2 kinds of objects to decipher. This version involves three different objects to interpret, which will really give them something fun to do and most likely fry their brains by working logically - and because this is something you purchased from me, your kids will also have a chance to make their own puzzles to share with one another.