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Showing posts from December, 2011

I'll make a mathematician out of you yet

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I have been surfing around in the polymer clay folks flikr pages, and I came across an old blog, called " Dora's Explorations ." Dora made a terrific shaded polymer cane showing the Bhaskara's Behold! proof of Pythagoras' Theorem. (She also made a tutorial; the link is below the image.) http://dorasexplorations.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/cane-of-the-week-7509-behold-part-ii/ Making the clay blend so that the shading in this cane went the way she wanted it to lead her to experience mathematics in the very way that mathematicians experience it in the course of research. She wrote: "I had to make a Skinner block that would shade diagonally from the corner.  Another 2 or 3 frustrating hours were spent in trying to figure out how to do this.   If I had better mathematical or mechanical skills, I would have been able to mentally ’track back’ from the finished shaded triangles to the initial Skinner blend.  But instead I had to cut out little shaded paper tria