December 7, 2021
The Roommate Problem:
December 1, 2020
Conway's Game of Life:
We looked at two famous creations of the mathematician John H. Conway: the Look-and-Say sequence, and Conway's Game of Life. The Game of Life provides simple rules by which configurations of squares on a (infinitely large) checker board evolve, stagnate, or go extinct. We played around with some of these configurations to see where Life would take them, learning about still lifes, oscillators, and spaceships. If you want to play around with Life some more, you can use this website: https://playgameoflife.com/.
If you want to see the slides from the session, they are here:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1vTUAVgiI3i4lK8zuwCv60kAGrvnOihu8-aTrFRpx8Es/edit?usp=sharing
And if you want to dive deep into the Game of Life, you can look here: https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Main_Page.
We looked at two famous creations of the mathematician John H. Conway: the Look-and-Say sequence, and Conway's Game of Life. The Game of Life provides simple rules by which configurations of squares on a (infinitely large) checker board evolve, stagnate, or go extinct. We played around with some of these configurations to see where Life would take them, learning about still lifes, oscillators, and spaceships. If you want to play around with Life some more, you can use this website: https://playgameoflife.com/.
If you want to see the slides from the session, they are here:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1vTUAVgiI3i4lK8zuwCv60kAGrvnOihu8-aTrFRpx8Es/edit?usp=sharing
And if you want to dive deep into the Game of Life, you can look here: https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Main_Page.
February 2020
Serious Symmetry! We examined symmetry in various shapes to develop our own conjectures and questions related to symmetry across lines of reflections and rotational symmetry. We, then, tested two of those questions, can a shape have exactly 2 lines of symmetry and can you have a shape with reflection symmetry but not rotational symmetry. We did this using a paper folding activity where we created two interesting lines, drew an image (a dot, for a first example) and reflected it over and over across the two lines to create a symmetric image. In the end, we found that we often get more symmetry than we bargained for. Handouts can be found on the Southwest Chicago Math Teachers' Circle Resources page, found here: https://southwestchicagomathcircle.wordpress.com/resources/.
December 2019
Conway’s rational tangles. We played with pieces of rope, and also talk about mathematical operations. Somehow these ideas came together and we (hopefully) understand some things. If you would like to read more about these fun tangles, take a look at the article below.
rational-tangles.pdf |
October 2019
Welcome to Cataland! We explored some famous counting problems, such as counting ways to walk in a grid. Amazingly, lots (but not all) of these problems have the same answer: the famous Catalan numbers!
You can find the resources from this session here. If you want to see even more things counted by Catalan numbers, you can look here.
You can find the resources from this session here. If you want to see even more things counted by Catalan numbers, you can look here.