Origami and GeoGebra – a slightly different version

For GeoGebra enthusiasts who are attending GeoGebra conferences, don’t throw your GeoGebra flyers. Watch the video and see how useful it is. 🙂

Potato chips and mathematics

If your math teacher told you that mathematics is everywhere, believe him.   Almost all the things that we see around (even things that we do not see)  are  related to mathematics  — even potato chips. Yes, even potato chips.

Some potato chips, particularly Pringles (I hope they give me 500 bucks for this), are in a shape of a saddle.  In mathematics a saddle-shaped graph is called a hyperbolic paraboloid (see left figure).

A hyperbolic paraboloid quadratic and doubly ruled surface given by the Cartesian equation $z = \displaystyle\frac{y^2}{b^2} - \frac{x^2}{a^2}$.  Now, whatever that means will be discussed when you take your analytic geometry course.

For now, let’s be happy that we  know that even potato chips can be modeled by graphs. 🙂

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Sources: Omg Facts, Pringle’s Site, Wolfram Math World

Photo Credit: Hyperbolic Paraboloid (Wikimedia), Pringles chips (Wikimedia)

Nature by Numbers: Watch and fall in love with math

This is a captivating video ‘inspired by numbers, geometry and nature’ and was created by Cristóbal Vila.   The video explains the connections between the Fibonacci sequence 1,1,2,3,5,8,13, … (can you see the pattern?), and nature (the golden rectangle, the nautilus, the sunflower, etc.).

For non-math people, you will appreciate this video if you know the concepts behind it.

I came across with this video about two weeks ago, but I had no chance to post it until I was reminded by a post about it at the  MathFuture wiki. On the funny side, there were more than 10 thousand who liked the video in Youtube, but 122 disliked it (plus a few more recently). One user (GatorTomKK) had the following comment for those 122 (and possibly for future ‘dislikers‘) :

122 people﻿ don’t understand math in general.

I can’t help but grin after reading the comment, and I’m sure your doing the same.