Month: July 2012

Wholemovement and The Art of Folding Circles

Resources and Freebies

Last week, I discovered Wholemovement, an interesting origami site about folding circles. The site highlights the beauty of circles and exhibits variety of 3D shapes that can be constructed from it.

To those who want to try the basics, you can read how to fold circles. The page includes procedures on creating a sphere, a tetrahedron, an octahedron, and an icosahedron using a circle. You may also want to explore the Gallery page to view more complicated folds.

Paper folding is closely related to mathematics. We can consider creases as lines, and intersections as points. Folding papers emphasizes congruence, symmetry, and transformation.

To those who are interested in this topic, check out Professor Kazuo Haga’s book Origamics. It is an excellent resource on the mathematics of problem solving.

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Who’s the Winner?

Games and Puzzles, Math Lite

Five students have just completed a logic contest. Lois Lang,  a school reporter and last year’s logic contest champion, asked for an interview.

winner

Oh, this is giving me a headache!

Th students decided to test Lois Lang. Each student agreed to make one true and one false statement during the interview.

Frances: Kai was second. I was fourth.
Leyton: I was third. Charles was last.
Denise: Kai won. I was second.
Kai: Leyton had the best score. I came in last.
Charles: I came in second. Kai was third.

Help Lois Lang determine the winner.

Adapted from Discovering Geometry

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Mu Alpha Theta: 10,000+ Math Contest Problems with Solutions

Resources and Freebies

If you have read 20 000+  math contest problems and solutions and enjoyed it, this post is also for you. Although I have included Mu Alpha Theta in that list, I have never actually counted (or approximated) the number of questions. This means that the title of that post should have been 30 000 contest problems.  Yes, Mu Alpha Theta is one of the richest math problem sources on the net.

math contest problems

Mu Alpha Theta is the US National High School and Two-Year College Mathematics Honor Society. It has more than 88,000 student members in more than 1,800 schools.  The Mu Alpha Theta competition is held every year and the website has released competition questions for the past 17 years.

The Mu Alpha Theta website contains more than 10,000 math questions from its past tests including solutions and answers. The tests includes questions on Algebra, Geometry, Calculus, Matrices, Number Theory and other fields of mathematics collected from 1995 to 2011. If you want to test your mathematical skills, it looks like you’ll have enough problems to solve for the next couple of years.

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