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.

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

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 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 a very uncomfortable fact: it takes 4 pounds of potatoes to make 1 pound of potato chips. That means that for every 1 pound bag of potato chips you eat, 3 pounds of potatoes have to be thrown away. What a waste of food! This is a series of activities that looks at the hidden world of food waste. It includes a look at how much food is wasted as it is "processed" into finished products like french fries and potato chips. It also includes mathematical activities where students calculate how

This activity uses a classic Abbot & Costello comedy routine to explain the concept of comparing numbers using ratios. This short video, which is available on YouTube, is about 5 minutes long and features a routine by Abbot and Costello where they compare the age of two people using the difference in their age (40 and 10) to create a ratio ("I am 4 times older than the 10 year old) and then re-calculates the ratio after 5 has been added to create 45:15, which is 3:1 when simplified. There is an

This is a very fun and motivating activity that can be done in 1 - 2 class periods, along with homework. It tells the story of an intern at a website who figures out a way to "hack" his burrito to almost twice the size by ordering "half-portions" of items like red and black beans, chicken and beef, and white and brown rice. The activity looks at how hacking each ingredient adds to the weight of the burrito through the number of additional ounces and how those additional ounces can be written as

This is the most carefully and completely documented use of the "The Handshake Problem" (also known as the "Glass Clink Problem") that you can find. It spans 5 days worth of lessons, homework assignments, enrichment and an assessment. The beauty of the "handshake problem" is that it can be looked at as a way to represent a problem visually through the use of points and connecting edges, but it can be investigated as a sequence of triangular numbers. This is then be compared to other types of seq

Jacob Lawrence was perhaps the preeminent painter of the Harlem Renaissance. During his lifetime, he produced among the most striking works that depicted everything from the northern migration of African Americans during the 1920s, to the daily life of the community in Harlem. His paintings incorporate many mathematical ideas, including patterns and geometry, as well as ratio and proportion. This activity makes use of a portion of his 1945 painting The Shoemaker to analyze Lawrence's use of dist