AP Calculus students are finishing their year exploring cool topics in mathematics. They took a two day foray into a bit of number theory, looking at numeration and place value from various perspectives. First was a foray into other bases, including binary, hexadecimal, and base 8, admittedly just so that they could listen to Tom Lehrer’s song “New Math” — a musical rendition of a subtraction problem in base 8. This led to a board contest between the class’ juniors and seniors, solving base 8 subtraction problems whose answers, mysteriously, turned into ’2011′ and ’2010′ in base 10.
Next was a diversion into a kind of symbolic representation of numbers known as ‘Harvey Balls’, convenient as the clock in the math classroom represents the hours in Harvey Balls rather than numbers. (This effort also led to the accidental but entirely humorous discovery of an individual whose name, actually, was indeed “Harvey Ball”, and whose gift to civilization was the ubiquitous yellow Smiley Face.)
Finally, they learned how to solve addition problems with a Japanese abacus, known as a soroban. Pairs of students then faced off at the abacus, racing to solve addition problems. Check out these photos, so you can vicariously experience our ecstasy of victory and agony of defeat.
Now you can ask any AP Calc student this joke:
Why couldn’t the number theorist tell the difference between Halloween and Christmas?
Answer: Because OCT 31 = DEC 25.
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- Abracadabra, presto chango, I’ve got the answer!
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- I got it. I got it. Well, maybe not??????
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- Abacus. It really is quite logical and simple.
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- Can someone tell me how to do this?
Ed: Thanks to our own Lobachevsky for the math review! Btw – to brush up on your ‘New Math’ – here’s Tom Lehrer:
