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

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

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 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

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 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.

Note: this is the same as the "winter theme three part number logic puzzles," but with "silly icons" instead of "winter icons." This is a sequel to 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 somethin

This is an activity that uses data collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center tracking the use of Confederate symbols in the form of monuments, courthouses, schools, and other public amenities, including parks, highways and holidays. The activity takes place in 3 parts: The first part is that students assemble and label a timeline that tracks the rise of Confederate symbols from 1860 to the present day (2016.) In the second part, students match dates to 10 different events in Civil Rights h

This is one in a continuing series of activities that takes mathematics and applies it to social issue, including Food Waste and Mathematics: From Farm to Table to Dump, Mathematics, Demographics & Slavery: The 1790 Census in Ratio, Percents & Graphs, MathBusters: Percentage Practice to Analyze 2016 Election Results, and Statistics, Histograms and Lies Presidential Candidates Tell. In this case, we are looking at how far food must travel in order to make it from where it is produced to the place

This is a collection of 12 different division reasoning problems that require your students to understanding through written explanations. No, it doesn't mean your students are going to explain the long division algorithm by writing about the steps they took to solve the problem. First of all, who cares? Second of all, it doesn't really show a mastery of the concept of division; it only shows they have memorized the steps in an algorithm that is totally unnecessary to memorize in an age of calcu

These are four puzzles that explore the issue of parity, which has to do with the "evenness" and "oddness" of a number. The first two puzzles involve "visual parity," which has to do with how two colors or shapes "match" up to one another. The second two are puzzles that involve numerical parity, neither of which has a solution due to the nature of odd and even numbers. They come in poster form, or you can print them out 4 to a sheet a leave them around for your students to puzzle over. Include

This is a wonderful activity which uses a real life paradox to explore how ratios change by adding the same number to the quantities being compared. We start with our friend Bud and his nephew Lou. Bud is 40, Lou is 10, so the ratio of Bud's age to Lou's age is 40:10, or 4:1. 5 years later, Bud is 45, Lou is 15, so now the ratio has changed: their ratio is 45:15, which can be simplified down to 3:1. Using this idea (which was based on a very inappropriate Abbot & Costello routine from long ago)

This is an old brain teaser that someone told me, and which I shortened and clarified, as well as added clues for your students to use, as well as three different explanations for how to solve it. Basically, the problem goes like this: you have 7 people who want to find the average of their salaries. The only problem is that no one wants to tell anyone how much they earn. How will you find the average without anybody stating their actual salary? I've run this problem by all my techie type frie

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