Playful Math Education Carnival #119

Welcome to Playful Math Education Carnival #119! Just to be clear, that exclamation is to express excitement, not factorial. Fortunately, you will have a bit of time before there's any danger of confusing this post with the edition (119 factorial).

Anyway, only the very coolest folks get to handle a MTaP edition that can be written with a factorial. And I just realized how close (and yet how far) I was to such glory.

119 Fun facts

• 119 is the number to call for emergency services... in parts of Asia (wiki reference).
• Of course, 119 backwards is 911 which is the US emergency services phone number
• 119 is aspiring, the sequence formed by summing proper factors ends with a perfect number.
• 119 isn't prime, but it almost feels like it
• 119 = 7 x 17. I don't think products of consecutive primes ending in 7 has a name, but maybe it should?

Do you have other fun facts about 119? Please? Please?

Dedication

I'm saddened to note the passing of  Alexander Bogomolny this month, and I dedicate the edition of the  carnival to him. The material he developed and made available on his site

https://www.cut-the-knot.org/ is truly amazing and remains with us for our benefit.

Miscellaneous

Aperiodical has an article from Benjamin Leis on the Big Internet Math-off.

Something James Propp wrote as part of the Big Internet Math-off: A pair of shorts. 

Elementary

I was reminded of the game of Chomp! in Shecky Riemann's linkfest (most of which isn't elementary level, but worth investigating).

Cathy O'Neil tells her mathematician origin story. I hope all our kids can have an empowering math experience like this.

Discussion of a "square dancing" puzzle from Mike Lawler: part 1 and part 2. I think there is a lot more to explore here and hope some of you will write parts 3 and beyond... 

I always love game discussions. Set is a game you probably all know, but in case you don't here's an intro and a deeper analysis in the Aperiodical.

Pat Ballew writes about divisibility rules. Pat also discusses a fun XKCD in prime time fun.

I'm delighted at how this starts with something many take for granted (12 hour vs 24 hour time of day conventions) and then builds a fun exploration.

Middle school

Have you been waiting for someone to write the perfect post giving you an introduction to tons of Desmos activities? Well, Mary Bourrasa has done it for you.

Michael Pershan tweeted a pointer to a nice collection of logic puzzles on puzzling stackexchange.

Denise Gaskins pointed out a past note about factor trees and some cute wordplay from Danica McKellar's book: prime numbers are like monkeys.

This segues directly into a review of two number theory books by Ben Leis (also the author of the Big Internet Math off post above) in which he discusses some other visualizations beyond factor trees: 

High school

Mr Honner: math around us and parallel lines cut congruent arcs on a circle in a nice picture. 

Ben Orlin invents and illustrates a new adage that there are no puddles in mathematics, only oceans in disguise. 

More advanced

Mathematical theorems you had no idea existed because they are false: https://www.facebook.com/BestTheorems/

Have fun finding counterexamples. Also, link disproves the conjecture that there is nothing worthwhile on facebook.

The Scientific American Blog has been running these columns on "my favorite theorem." Go back and take a look (I think this was their first one): Amie Wilkinson's favorite theorem.

A fascinating discussion of the Fields' Medal and some ideas about what it should be supporting. 

What was the score? Maybe the sum of scores was 119?