Unschooling Math Jams: Squaring Numbers in their own Base

Some of the most fun I have working on math with seven year-old No. 1 is discovering new things about math myself. Last week, we discovered that square of any number in its own base is 100! Pretty cool! As usual we figured it out by talking rather than by writing things down, and as usual it was sheer happenstance that we figured it out at all. Here’s how it went.

I've really been looking forward to working through multiplication ala binary numbers with seven year-old No. 1. She kind of beat me to the punch though: in the last few weeks she's been learning her multiplication tables in base 10 on her own. This became apparent when five year-old No. 2 decided he wanted to do some 'schoolwork' a few days back.

"I can sing that song... about the letters? all by myself now!" 2 meant the alphabet song. His attitude towards academics is the ultimate in not retaining unnecessary facts, not even the name of the song :)

After 2 had worked his way through the song, No. 1 wanted to show off, and said "Listen to me!"

Mom-person shut her down with "What's 3 times 2?"

A few seconds later No. 1 replied, "6!"

Getting three year-old No. 3 involved, Mom-person asked, "What's 2 plus 1?"

3 immediately, and happily replied "5!" her answer to almost all math questions.

Mom-person turned to No. 2 next, "OK, what's 2 plus 1?"

After a bit of work, and some reconnoitering of fingers, 3 responded with "3!"

I wanted to make sure 1 was keeping 1's hand in the game with binary numbers, and she was having fun demonstrating her math prowess, so I asked, "How do you write 3 in base 2?"

She thought for a bit, "11."

"Yup, that's it."

Then, Mom-person jumped in with the question that started up the rest of the conversation, "What's 10 times 10?"

No. 1 had in fact been working on memorizing her multiplication tables. "100," she replied.

I asked her how you write 100.

"1, 0, 0"

1 and I had been worked on multiplication as shifting in binary a few weeks ago. I hopped back in with "What's 2 times 2?"

"4"

"How do you write that in binary?"

"1, 0, 0?" she answered.

"Yup!"

I hadn't known the pattern before, but I thought I saw it now. I asked No. 1, "What's 5 times 5?"

No. 1 hadn't memorized this one yet, so she started in flashing one hand full of five fingers after another at herself, counting as she went.

Meanwhile, I was working through what base five digits would hold on my fingers. You get up to four on the first digit. On the second digit, 1 is equal to 1 in the fives place, you can all the way up to four though, so you can get four fives in the fives place followed by four ones in the ones place which gives you twenty-four before you run out of room which means.

"Five times five is 25!" No. 1 cut in just ahead of me.

Having just figured out everything would work out I asked, "How do you write that down in base 5?"

1 looked at me for a few seconds.

"Well, if 10 times 10 is written down as 1, 0, 0 in base 10, and 2 times 2 is written down as 1, 0, 0 in base two, what's 5 times 5 written down as in base 5?"

"1, 0, 0!"

And so we'd figured out an easy way to write down the square of a number, just write it down in its base, and it'll be, (you guessed it), 1, 0, 0!

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain ...

The Alcubierre Warp Drive Tophat Function and Open Science with Sage

I transferred yesterday's Mathematica file with the Alcubierre warp drive[2] line element and space curvature calculations to the +Sage Mathematical Software System today, (the files been added to the public repository [3]). If you haven't used Sage before, it's a Python based software package that's similar in functionality to Mathematica. Oh, and it' free. I also worked a little more on understanding the theory, but frankly, I made far more progress with the software than the theory. What follows will be a little more of the Alcubierre theory, plus, a cool Sage interactive demo of one of the Alcubierre functions[1], as well as a bit about my first experience with using Sage. Theory The theory is fun, but it's moving slowly. Here's the chalk board from this morning's discussion Alcubierre setup the derivation using something called the 3+1 formalism which means we consider space to be flat, (in this case), slices that are labelled ...

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1. While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero. This is typically explained in the following way. While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare. That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2]. Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector. Its operation is in...

Copasetic Flow

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