Math Teachers at Play # 8 is up for your entertainment and education at Let's Play math.... and they have math jokes... including the one above, which made me chuckle..

They also have a link to Soma Cubes (Soma Do, and Soma Don't)... A geometric assembly puzzle that, in the words of the creator, Piet hein, shows, "It is a beautiful humour of the nature, that the 7 simplest irregular combinations of cubes, can be recombined to the cube again. The multitudes of unity is again producing the unity. This is the worlds smallest philosophic system, and that surely must be an advantage". Like most people of my generation, I was first introduced to them by Martin Gardner in Scientific American, and was unaware until today that they were invented in 1936, "during a lecture of Quantum physics by Werner Heisenberg (Father of the un-certain principle). "

Dave Marain at MathNotations has several nice SAT problems that are worth stealing for your own class room.

So get over there, and enjoy yourself.

Things I Learned at the Carnival

They just posted the newest "Math Teachers at Play", a math education carnival, this time hosted by Kate at f(t). There are lots of good reasons you should visit if you are a teacher of math at any level, a student, someone just interested in math, or just the curious kind of person who drops by my blog.
They started this time with a link to my post on centroids, "Just an Average Point"; which proves they must have wonderful stuff...
Ok, if that isn't enough to convince you, there are all kinds of cool things I picked up in just a few moments on a couple of the links... Did you know???
33 is the largest number that is not a sum of distinct triangular numbers. Which made me wonder, can you get them all with distinct triangular numbers using addition AND subtraction???? Haven't checked myself yet, but curious.

34 is the smallest number with the property that it and its neighbors have the same number of divisors. Hmmm? That's three in a row... can you find the smallest TWO consecutive numbers that have the same number of factors (ok,gotta be bigger than 2...

40 is the only number whose letters are in alphabetical order.... which has GOT to be a great trivia question. It also got me wondering...are there numbers in Spanish, Greek, Russian, Tagalog... ???? that are in alphabetical order, and is there a language that there is not ANY number that is spelled in alphabetical order? Ok, Help me out here readers!!!!!

And besides, there was this great "space invaders" cartoon... and if you are too young to know what space invaders was...well, heck, you are just TOO YOUNG.