Math Storytelling Day is observed annually on September 25th. It was created by Maria Droujkova of naturalmath.com in 2009 on her birthday after she read a blog post by Seth Godin entitled “What should I do on your birthday?”
On this day, Math lovers share their love of Maths through storytelling, but today, I’ll be sharing a few facts instead of telling stories.
* Pythagoras established the Pythagorean School, whose doctrine it was that mathematics ruled the universe and whose motto was “All is number”.
* Mathematics is not discovered; it is invented.
* It wasn’t until the 16th century that most mathematical symbols were invented. Before this time math equations were written in words.
* It is believed that Ancient Egyptians used complex mathematics such as algebra, arithmetic, and geometry as far back as 3000 BC.
* French Mathematician and inventor, Blaise Pascal contributed Pascal’s triangle and probability theory. He also invented an early digital calculator.
* What comes after a million, billion, and trillion? A quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, and nonillion.
* An icosagon is a shape with 20 sides.
* Trigonometry is the study of the relationship between the angles of triangles and their sides.
* Here’s a fun fact:
The name of the search engine ‘Google’ came from a misspelling of the word ‘googol’, which is a very large number (the number one followed by one hundred zeros to be exact).
* A ‘googolplex’ is the number 1 followed by a googol zeros, this number is so big that it can’t be written because there isn’t enough room in the universe to fit it in. It would take a length of time far greater than the age of the universe just to write the numbers.
* The number Pi (the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle) can’t be expressed as a fraction, this means it is an irrational number. When written as a decimal it never repeats and never ends. Here is Pi written to 50 decimal places: 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939935710 (I can only hope that I wrote this right!)
A fun problem!
Cutting a cake into 8 pieces with JUST 3 slices is very possible. How do you go about doing that?
Have fun solving that one! It’s really easy. 🙂
***Cody Martin GIFs via Google Search