Doing Math with Cheez-Its, and Other Diversions

  

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Steven Strogatz strikes again! Don't miss the latest installments of this wonderful series of articles on math for the general, adult public. He is working his way up the curriculum, the latest article  dealing with geometry and square roots.

One of the highlights for me was his suggestion that we use little square crackers to mess around with the Pythagorean theorem, satisfy ourselves that it works, and understand why. Cheez-Its came immediately to mind.

What I love about this series is that it aims to take some of the bad mystery out of topics in math and replace it with good mystery -- decreasing that ratio in our systems, perhaps a bit like bad cholesterol and good cholesterol.

While keeping things interesting for the math conversant, he speaks directly to the math-apathetic, the math-fearful, and the math avoiders, and is probably changing more than a few minds.