A Helping of Friday Potpourri

A compendium of mathy links you might want to check out over the weekend, if you've missed….

1) A "fiendish" set of brain teasers here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/dara-obriains-brain-teasers-try-the-comedians-fiendishly-tough-maths-quiz-9144496.html

2) If you missed this CBS News clip on math teacher Jim O'Connor, well, stop whatever you're doing and watch it (…and have a kleenex ready):
http://www.upinspire.com/inspire/1184/this-math-teacher-kept-a-big-s

3) A creative approach to trigonometry here (from the BetterExplained site):

http://betterexplained.com/articles/intuitive-trigonometry/

4) Interestingly, just weeks after a Kazakh mathematician claimed a proof (still being studied) of Navier-Stokes equations, none-other than Terry Tao has offered a new approach to the problem:

http://tinyurl.com/ljf37kn

5) I won't pretend to understand all this digital currency stuff… but that doesn't stop me from finding it fascinating... enter "Riecoin": http://tinyurl.com/kgjg7q4

6) just some fractal fun, Sierpinski style: http://beautyandthemaths.tumblr.com/post/77265096812

...as always, a lot of math education ideas bouncing around the mathosphere, including:

7) another Top 10 issues in math education, this time from Brie Finegold:
http://blogs.ams.org/blogonmathblogs/2014/02/25/my-top-ten-issues-in-mathematics-education/

8) more on the troubles in math education here, via Slate:  http://tinyurl.com/kfbkedf

9) Meanwhile, Arizona is dumping Common Core; read all about it in these 2 places:

http://www.goodmath.org/blog/?p=2882  (from Mark Chu-Carroll)

http://tinyurl.com/kky7z46  (AZ. newspaper)

10) And Alex Bellos gets schooled on current math education in Britain in this 1/2 hr. podcast:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03szv89 , and I already linked (over at Math-Frolic) to this Conrad Wolfram piece on reforming British math education: http://tinyurl.com/kyp8yto

11) Lastly, not math, but still an interesting post, on who gets hired by Google... where "expertise," even a college degree, is not so important, but here's what is:  http://tinyurl.com/lxny6g9


-- Sunday, or Monday at latest, I should have another interview up here with another cyber math enthusiast, meanwhile enjoy some of the above links… and, your weekend! (and let me know ASAP of any broken links)