Math Through Technology Every Week!

Due to interest from some students of mine and their parents, I'll be holding Math Through Technology meetings at the Learning Studios in Burlingame on Thursday evenings on an ongoing, informal, drop-in basis. It'll be an introduction to computer programming in the context of learning math. Participants can come in and learn how to write some programs in Logo and Python to help visualize geometry and graphics or to aid in the complicated computations involved in higher math.

More information on my website at http://farrellpolymath.com/services/math-through-technology-every-thursday-at-7-pm/

Hope to see you there!

Visual Proofiness

Everybody knows the earth orbits the sun and not the other way around, right? Can you prove it? That's the problem Newton had. How could he prove that all that was needed to create Kepler's elliptical orbits was a force of attraction between the Earth and the Sun and for the Earth to be moving a little? Like a good mathematician he proved it algebraically. You can see a "proof" of this anywhere, but I doubt algebra is enough to convince anybody.

I don't know why Newton didn't just use Visual Python. With surprisingly little coding you can create a 3D world full of balls and boxes and arrows and make them do whatever you like. Now we can create an Earth and a Sun, code in a force of attraction and an initial velocity using vectors (and that's the reason to learn to use vectors!), set the world in motion and see what happens.

Here's how I proved it. (I ain't Vi Hart, so you don't need to hear me narrate.)