taking a break

We are taking a break from updating this blog. Our latest meeting locations can be found at the MathsJams site.

A Very Special MathJam – October 21, 2014

Let’s make history!

The MegaMenger project is a distributed fractal project. This project is a joint brain-child of Matt Parker (@standupmaths) and Laura Taalman (@mathgrrl). You can read about it here at MegaMenger.com.

Katie Steckles (@stecks) makes the creation of a Level 1 build look easy in this
video. We will create our Level 1 build at this upcoming MathJam on October 21.

Photo credit: Manchester Science Festival

It is hoped that twenty level-three Menger Sponges around the planet will form a distributed level-four sponge, the largest ever made out of business cards. The plan is for every location to build their level-three sponge during the week of the 20 to 26 October 2014, which includes the Martin Gardner Global Celebration of Mind Gatherings on 21 October – the same day for MathJam! Coincidence?

By Sunday 26 October, it is hoped that twenty locations around the globe will have been united in building an amazing 3D fractal.

So, again, fellow mathies – let’s make history! Let’s get Winnipeg on the map as part of this unique mathematical endeavour! Bring on the cards and let’s get folding!

Note – I will bring enough cards for everyone to fold. Just let me know you are coming by emailing me at winnipeg@mathsjam.com.

Posted by Sherri

Recap for September 2014

Missing the first Mathjam back after a three-month summer break was heartbreaking! Alas, our administration scheduled “Meet the Teacher” on the same evening as Mathjam. Will have to have a quiet word with our Principal to see if we can change that for next year!

I understand a terrific time was had by all. Several puzzles involving decks of cards were solved and several problems solved quite quickly. One was not. It was a problem found from an August retweet by LDS Mathsjam. The tweet can be seen here.   pic.twitter.com/AWVDOH52ax

The probability puzzle posted by David Radcliffe (@daveinstpaul) caused quite the discussion, apparently! Sorry to have missed it!

Can’t wait for Mathjam next month.

Posted by Sherri

Recap for January 2014

Well, we are getting a little better keeping the blog up to date. Only a week to go before our next meeting in February!

🙂

Let’s blame this one on the intense cold we have been dealing with here in Winnipeg. Again we had perfect attendance. We welcomed back a few regulars who were not able to make our December session.

 

In the December blog post, we were excited to talk about the math + art exhibition showing at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. This session we were pleased to have our own math artist attend the January MathJam. We enjoyed hearing about the inspirations behind her art work. Those in attendance were able to take home a couple of custom designed cards.

 

And, of course, I enjoyed the paper folding activities from MoMath (tumbling tetrahedrons).

Cheers,

Phil

Recap for December 2013

The holiday season in December changed the traditional MathsJam date in the month. We held our session on December 17. Same time and location. As usual, we had “perfect” attendance 🙂

We welcomed a new member to the fold – @bkmetcalfe for those of you using Twitter. Brian and I had fun playing “ultimate tic tac toe”, as well as creating the paper folding challenge of the session.

We were also excited to learn that the Winnipeg Art Gallery was having a special curated feature Math + Art . Several members of our MathJam had been there earlier in the day.

We also played with pairs of integers from 1 to 17, making perfect squares with each adjacent pair.

 

Lots of fun was had by all.

Cheers, Phil

Recap for November 2013

Sadly, I waited far too long to do this post. Only 3 days until our next meeting, and my memory is letting me down! I do know that we had great fun playing with iota, and we did try our best to wrap a cube. Hmm…I shall do better next time!

So, fellow Winnipeg jammers, please do help me out here. I will add some photos, as I know that we took quite a few that night. Our resident twit was enjoying the camera on his new phone, so I should be able to include some of those in this post in the near future.

Looking forward to our December meeting.

See you soon!

Posted by Sherri

Recap for October 2013

Another meeting and another new face at the meeting! It is always great to meet new people. We introduced our new member to what happens at a MathJam by playing a few rounds of SET and solving some problems. We dug into some problems that @stecks shared with us, and we did our best to find those elegant solutions that we knew would be hiding within.

After discussing some number theory and number tricks for multiplication, we tweeted out one of our favourite problems…the train and the bridge. @icecolbeveridge,was one of the first to reply via @mathsjam, and he liked the problem so much he and @reflectivemaths featured it in their most recent episode of Wrong, But Useful podcast. These podcasts are great fun and are well worth the listen!

A wonderful mathsy evening, indeed!

Posted by Sherri

Recap for September 2013

Having been away from math jamming for the summer it was great to meet again at the Round Table to imbibe the fellowship and the mathematics [okay, so I am forcing the use of the word, “imbibe” but it seems to fit].  We started the evening by solving some problems and talking about our summer reading; “The Housekeeper and the Professor” was a popular choice.

We were missing a couple of our faithful tech-savvy members so we were not wired to twitter during the evening.  Nonetheless, prior to the evening, we checked in on twitter to see that the UK Mathsjam folks were working on the idea of folding paper many times and making one straight-line cut to produce a straight line shape (swan, fish, star).  See Erik Demaine’s webpage at http://erikdemaine.org/foldcut/   We weren’t too successful – the best shape of the night was a fish with an unusual polygon-shaped growth attached to it.  We might try this again in the future.

We also worked on this problem presented at the London MathJam.  The image has a quarter circle and two interlocking semicircles.  The problem is to prove that shaded area a equals shaded area b.  One of our members wrote up this tidy solution in the margin.

Kathy shared some artwork with a math theme that she created over the summer.  If you look at the detail of the pieces you may be able to figure out the connection to mathematicians or to mathematics topics.  Kathy also treated those of us who were sitting around the table with smaller, bookmark-sized replicas of the art pieces (now proudly displayed on my desk!).   For those who missed or may need a hint about the math connection, I think Kathy plans on showing the artwork again at next month’s Mathjam.

We carefully studied a puzzle/novelty item called Jacob’s Ladder.  It has some unusual characteristics that made us think of connections to topology.  I wish I had a picture…

We ended the evening with a couple of rounds of Set and for the first time, for me, we were dealt 15 cards that had no set (unless you can find one!).

I hope you’ll plan to be at next month’s  Mathjam in Winnipeg.

Posted by Ian

Recap for May 2013

With several new members joining us this month (yay!), we began our MathJam with a few rounds of SET. Most of the newbies to the group had not seen this game before, so the regulars had a distinct advantage…well, at least for the first wee while! There were a couple of VERY quick studies to the game –  a promising start to the evening!

Next, we shared our favourite reads for the upcoming MathJam hiatus. We must have something to do when we are not meeting again until September! Favourite titles included, but were not limited to, the following:

The Housekeeper and The Professor, by Yoko Ogawa

Here’s Looking at Euclid by Alex Bellos

Is God a Mathematician by Mario Livio

My biggest smile of the night came with the display of Ian’s (our Ian, not the author) books.  They were all written by an Ian…the same Ian but a different Ian than our Ian…yes, it was confusing that night, too. In short, I think that Ian Stewart has a fan!

Some of the Ian Stewart books shared:

In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World

Another Fine Math You’ve Got Me Into

Does God Play Dice?

Book sharing came to an abrupt end with a question about vulgar fractions. That prompted several conversations around the table, including a lovely little problem shared by one of the newbies. It was from one of the books shown in the above photo – The Penguin Book of Curious and Interesting Puzzles, by David Wells. Problem: using the digits from 1 to 9 inclusive, write a fraction that has an equivalent to one-half. Once we found the first one, we decided that there had to be others. And there were. We just don’t know if we found them all. Being the last ones up and jamming, we didn’t tweet it out. Perhaps someone will read the problem here and offer up a solution. That would be sweet to tweet next time!

We found a problem on the MathsJam twitter feed, and got to it. One of our newbies found a lovely solution and quite quickly, too, I might add! It was the one about a square, side length one unit…and fitting in the largest semi-circle inside….what would the radius be of said circle. Fun problem – geometry is always a hit with this crowd!

We had a few more maths recreational puzzles and conversations, and we even did some model building, but the time was fast approaching 10 p.m. While I am sure we could have jammed all night, responsibilities beckoned, and we had to call it a night.

Great to see so many new members out this month. Here’s hoping that we left them wanting for more…

We didn’t get to the promised origami, as time ran short. Next time!

Which, by the way, is in a very long time. With most of the regulars out of town for the summer months, we have agreed to take a break until the September meeting. Looking to hearing about the great summer reads and other mathematical mischief at that time.

Posted by Sherri

Recap for April 2013

Guessing the recaps should be written shortly after the meetings…egads, my memory is not good enough to wait this long to post…I’ll know better next time.

We skipped the SET game this time and went straight into a Tantrix puzzle. We had misplaced the rules, so we made things up as we went along. We did this while waiting to hear from fellow Washington DC MathJammers.

We were anxious to try out our P-Engima machines with people not in the room…how exciting!

Well…we weren’t political enough to understand the “sequester” message DC sent our way…had to Google it for some insight. Seems like our poli-sci Mathjam members let us down with that one! We came up with a lame “Spring has sprung”. We’ll have to think of one better for the next meeting. 😉

Spent a fair bit of time making sonobe units to create cubes and octahedrons. I was wanting to go for the icosahedron, but my partners were wanting to save it for the May meeting. Other MathJammers were making origami as well – we created Charlie’s Canadian cousin for our UK friends.

We had a fun time tweeting, coding, puzzling and folding. Can’t wait for our next meeting!

Posted by Sherri