The Most Beautiful Math I Have Ever Seen

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There’s something that is just amazing about this graph.  I love it.  It’s perfectly, slightly asymmetrical.  It is deep and detailed and simply beautiful.  And my student made it which makes even more awesome.

For those of you unaware, this is a product of Sam Shah’s Families of Curves project that I shamelessly stole for my algebra II students.  This piece was created with the function:

The parameter, k, varied on the interval [-7, 7] with steps of 0.25.  The window dimensions are approximately [-3.5, 3.5] in the x direction and [-120, 120] in the y direction.

I’m printing this out as a poster to hang in my room and will be giving the artist a print of their own.  I can’t wait to do this project again next year to add to what will become quite the mathematical art collection!

Tomorrow I’ll post a few of the other amazing pieces my students came up with!

Barbie Bungee and the POWER OF MATH

I’m riding my bike to school a lot in an effort to both save money on gasoline and enjoy the fact that I live just 3.5 miles from school.  The result of this, though, is that I have to be very careful about what I cram into my bag to bring to school.  Long story short: We did Barbie Bungee and not only did I leave my video camera at home, but I also happened to forget my phone.  Sigh.

However, thanks to the fact that we live in 2013 and a ridiculous number of my students have high definition cameras in their pockets, I was able to have a student email me this video, which I edited to slow down.  The video isn’t great, nor upright, but I think it hammers home a significant point:

Like, seriously, how cool is math?  A group modeled the number of rubber bands needed to maximize Barbie’s thrills (but not kills). They were given a height, used their model to predict how long their bungee cord needed to be and look at how amazingly close they got.  Go math.

Quick Note: Holy smokes this is post #99 for this blog.  I guess I need to figure out something special for the next one!