Infinite Series.

  I don't know if you remember shows like "Sesame Street" designed to teach children their numbers and letters while "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?" taught geography in a fun, entertaining way but there were not that many math based problems at that time except for Mathnet which ran from 1987 to 1992. 

In Mathnet, detectives used math and logic to solve crimes. The crimes range from figuring out who stole a signed baseball to determining the innocence of someone charged with robbery. 

The other night, I came across a new math based series from PBS called the "Infinite Series".  In it, mathematician, Kelsey Houston-Edward, provides situations showing how math is used all around us.  The episodes are not very long but can be seen on YouTube.  So far there have been two seasons made and they cover some interesting topics such as:

1.  Why individual honeycombs are built in a hexagonal shape rather than squares.
2.  Did you ever wonder why computers are bad at algebra?
3.  Picture a mathematician explaining mathematical probability to a gambler.
4. Why social networks allow us to model and analyze?
5. How about an explanation of Arrows Paradox?
6.  How to build an infinately long bridge using the harmonic series?
7. How does set theory handle infinity?
8. What are numbers made of?
9. We all know what the golden ratio is but have you heard of the silver ratio?
10. Is the analog clock a circle or a torus?

So far there have been two seasons of this series made.  The first season has 32 episodes while the second season has 19 before it was cancelled. I listed a taste of 10 out of the 51 episodes already made.   The series is produced by PBS digital studios and are easily accessible by everyone.

The nice thing about each video is that they range from 7 to 20 minutes long which are a perfect length for use in the class.  The video begins with someone explaining the problem before going on to cover it in detail.  The person explaining it might ask you to think of it in a slightly different way so as to make it easier to see.

I think I'll be spending time after school exploring these in more detail so I can figure out where to put them in my classes.  Check them out and let me know what you think, I'd love to know.  Have a great day.