Whew! What a week! Not only was it the week right after Spring Break (which is always a tough week), but it also happened to be a very busy mathematical week! Thursday, March 14 was Pi Day! Pi, a mathematical constant, was originally defined as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, i.e.…
Pi Day was served cold this year, with a la snow on the side. The unseasonably cold weather did not deter the Math Club from its celebration of 3/14 and various things mathematical. The Pi-athlon was run with teams of students solving mathematical puzzles for points, with the goal of gaining as close to…
How are Math and Baking related? Well, Tuesday, March 14, 2017 was Pi Day, a day entirely devoted to Pi = π ≈ 3.14. And, as mathematicians can also be quite “punny”, we relate “pi” to “pie”. I mean, typically they are both related to circles. Anyway, to celebrate Pi Day, the Roanoke College Math Club has…
Roanoke’s Cregger Center has a big “wow” factor. If you ask Mathematica, a software package used extensively at Roanoke, it will verify that the title “Cregger > Cameron” is true.* It may be that Mathematica is making a statement about alphabetical order, but it might be making a value judgment about the spacious new Cregger…
Well, it’s tough to admit, but on Feb 21, 2017, I was pigged…or, rather, my office was pigged. Why bring this up on a math blog post? Well, you may have heard about the game Pass the Pigs, which can be a very educational game in that it teaches people about probability. This game is very similar…
Everybody is getting interested in the Stat Crew! The Crew has been working home basketball games, recording locations of all shots and rebounds and creating reports that evaluate the performance of each player and each five-person lineup. Shown here are Crew members Maria Kuchenbuch, Cameron Eck, and David Moreau, with a guest analyst. At Wednesday…
The odds are that you don’t know the full significance of today’s date, November 13, 2015. Sure, it’s another Friday the 13th . (Did you know that the 13th day of the month falls on Friday more often than any other day of the week? That’s an odd fact!) More importantly, if you write the…
Those of us of a certain (large) age will remember the colorful mod art of the late 1960s; think Peter Max or the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. Professor Jan Minton’s HNRS 301: Mathematics and Art class has decorated a Trexler stairwell with what is truly mod art. Modular arithmetic, that is. An example of modular arithmetic…
The second floor of Trexler is haunted by intermittent clattering sounds! Actually, there is no need for a paranormal investigation, it’s just Drs. Taylor (Dave) and Childers (Adam) playing dice games. For Dave, this was partly research for his book The Mathematics of Games: An Introduction to Probability, recently published by CRC Press. The book…
There is an old saying that “the camera does not lie.” Putting aside the fact that PhotoShop does, the use of high-speed photography has revealed some fascinating facts. MCSP has such a camera; although it is very low resolution, we did capture a rubber band oscillating and verified the mathematical solution (found in Math 332)…
