Math on my mind

[sarahmichigan]

I've been reading a book I owned for more than a decade but never managed to read (skim, yes, read, no) called "Ancient Puzzles: Classic Brainteasers and Other Timeless Mathematical Games of the Past 10 Centuries" by Dominic Olivastro. Apparently it's a fairly obscure book and author since I've only found a handful of references to it or the author

Comments

[tgeller]

I watched the Math Doctor clip. I like his delivery and what he's doing, but found his rap frustrating because his logic didn't connect. He says, "math is in everything" and that you need math to sink a shot in basketball or to make a cake pretty.

But he's trying to promote the *knowledge* of math, and you don't need to *know* math for those things. They're instinctual.

He could fix it with specifics that *do* require knowledge of math. He started to do that with baking -- talking about fractions and measuring cups. I'd like to see more of that.

[chimalis]

I can remember having to do tangrams as part of an IQ test when I was four or so.