Playful Math Blog Carnival 186: Math Stories

… wherein I gather interesting math posts for your reading pleasure, especially those related to math storytelling. 

 

September 25 (today!) is Math Storytelling Day. And starting this year, it seems to also be 9-to-5 Day in honor of Dolly Parton. She might be a patron saint of stories, and I can sure imagine her delighting in math stories. As always, you can celebrate in many ways: read a math story, write your own math story, or support math stories for all.

In my carnival post from a year ago, Playful Math 182, I listed over a dozen of my favorite math stories, said a bit about the history of both Math Storytelling Day and math told in stories, and wrote a silly little math story. I am still working on my favorite math story ever, Althea and the Mysteries of Calculus. It still needs to be fully edited and illustrated before it gets published. But it’s already quite lovely. If you’d like to be a beta reader, you’d be helping me discover what parts of it different people like, and what doesn’t work quite as well as the rest. Contact me at altheasmathmysteries@gmail.com if interested.

 

The stories gathered here come mostly through Denise, and I want to give her credit. I've written this up, but she is feeling the pulse of the math lovers online. Here's one of her early posts on Math Storytelling Day, from 13 years ago. (Some of the links still work...)

186 has some stories to tell! 

We like sharing the stories of the carnival number. 186 has better stories to tell* than many numbers:

• 186 is a 'prime-additive number' since it can be written as a sum of powers of its prime factors: 2, 3, and 31. Can you find the powers? 
• It’s also a palindrome in four different number bases. Can you find them? 
• Have you heard of the four 4s puzzle? Make each number from 1 to 100 using exactly four 4s and any math operations you please. (No other digits allowed.) I’ve worked on that many times over the years. I’ve never tried to go past 100. It turns out that 186 can be found in this way. Can you find it? 
• See Ken Fan's contribution below! 

  

 

Games & Puzzles

Games are not stories (unless the game is something like Dungeons and Dragons, do you know any mathy story-games?), but games can bring joy to math in their own way. (Why do stories bring joy to math? Why do games bring joy to math? Do they infuse the math with its own joy?)

The Substitution Game, by Sonya Post is a story about a game, and about how children learn to think mathematically.

 

Here's a puzzle so ancient, Archimedes popularized it. Most people just tried to put the pieces together into a rectangle. For him, the interesting question was: How many solutions are there? The Ostomachion is beautiful and complex. Denise has made it accessible for you. And Sarah has written a delightful physics story about it, Allora and the Puzzles of Archimedes. (And we know how close math and physics are, but maybe that's another story.)

 

 

Pat Bellew tells the story of the Towers of Hanoi puzzle, played with 3 posts and disks of varying sizes. The disks start on one post, biggest at the bottom, getting smaller as you go up. They must be moved to another post, with a bigger disk never being above a smaller disk. 

 

Erica gives us Games to go with Stories, where both are from cultures around the world.

 

Fawn Nguyen's Visual Pattern puzzles have moved to a new online home, where they'll be easier to maintain. 

 

 

Stories

This story made me cackle multiple times. It was hard to get my head around the title, Maths Sheep Play Sheep, but the story was pure joy, both hearing David read it, and his longer story of where the words and the sheep came from.

  

I love Denise Gaskins' Alexandria Jones stories. They are full of adventure, and weave in all sorts of mathematical thinking. I hope someday she'll make a book of them. For now, she's reposting the stories one at a time.  Here's The Secret of the Pharaoh's Treasure, along with its sequel, Part 2.

 

John and Xavi Golden (father and son) have collaborated on a graphic novel, AL, Logical (pre-order it here). In this post he explains why a graphic novel was just right for the story he and Xavi wanted to tell.

John Golden also wrote a little story in honor of Math Storytelling Day, Sum Number Party. If you like zines, print this version out and fold it up. (How cool is that?!)   

 

 

A poem and a picture tell a story that makes a proof of the Pythagorean Theorem.** I definitely needed Greg Ross' help to follow that story.

 

 

Learning Math (Stories Included)

Bill McCallum points out that the stories we tell ourselves from math education research are often oversimplified.

 

Physics and math are close companions. Sarah writes stories about physics. Here she writes about the research supporting using stories to teach science.

 

In the Girls' Angle program, Ken Fan sets girls free to explore the math that they find most intriguing. Some of the students have gone on to amazing accomplishments. Milena Harned and Iris Liebman made a mathematical conjecture about the shapes made by crossing lines, and proved it while still in high school. Their paper, which they first submitted in 2022 was finally published just this year, as "An Unexpected Class of 5+-gon-free Line Patterns", in La Matematica, the Journal of the Association for Women in Mathematics.

To go with this blog carnival, Ken created the illustration you see here using 186 lines.  Iris and Milena proved that every polygon formed by those lines is either a triangle or a quadrilateral...no polygons with more than 4 sides!

 

 

And that's it for my birthday carnival! Read the old carnivals here. 

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*These facts about 186 come from https://www.numbersaplenty.com/186, which I desperately hope isn't part of the AI takeover of the internet. But how can one tell? I rejected at least two possible contributions for this post, suspecting they were AI.

** Calling this theorem the Pythagorean Theorem is Eurocentric. It was proved long before Pythagoras came around. I call it the Right Triangle Theorem.