Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival #121

Greetings one and all! Come, gather round! Wonder and spectate and — above all else — tell your friends of the Playful Mathematics Blog Carnival! Within is a buffet of delights and treats, fortifications for the mind and fire for the imagination.

121 is a special number. When I was a mere tot, growing in the wilds of suburban central New Jersey, it stood there. It held a spot of privilege in the multiplication tables on the inside front cover of composition books. On the forward diagonal, yet insulated from the borders. It anchors the safe interior. A square number, eleventh of that set in the positive numbers.

Art by Thomas K Dye, creator of the web comics Newshounds, Something Happens, and Infinity Refugees. His current project is Projection Edge. And you can get Projection Edge six months ahead of public publication by subscribing to his Patreon. And he’s on Twitter as @Newshoundscomic.

The First Tent

The first wonder to consider is Iva Sallay’s Find the Factors blog. She brings each week a sequence of puzzles, all factoring challenges. The result of each, done right, is a scrambling of the multiplication tables; it’s up to you the patron to find the scramble. She further examines each number in turn, finding its factors and its interesting traits. And furthermore, usually, when beginning a new century of digits opens a horserace, to see which of the numbers have the greatest number of factorizations. She furthermore was the host of this Playful Mathematics Education Carnival for August of 2018.

121 is more than just a square. It is the lone square known to be the sum of the first several powers of a prime number: it is , a fantastic combination. If there is another square that is such a sum of primes, it is unknown to any human — and must be at least 35 digits long.

We look now for a moment at some astounding animals. From the renowned Dr Nic: Introducing Cat Maths cards, activities, games and lessons — a fine collection of feline companions, such toys as will enterain them. A dozen attributes each; twenty-seven value cards. These cats, and these cards, and these activity puzzles, promise games and delights, to teach counting, subtraction, statistics, and inference!

Next and no less incredible is the wooly Mathstodon. Christian Lawson-Perfect hosts this site, an instance of the open-source Twitter-like service Mastodon. Its focus: a place for people interested in mathematicians to write of what they know. To date over 1,300 users have joined, and have shared nearly 25,000 messages. You need not join to read many of these posts — your host here has yet to — but may sample its wares as you like.

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The Second Tent

121 is one of only two perfect squares known to be four less than the cube of a whole number. The great Fermat conjectured that 4 and 121 are the only such numbers; no one has found a counter-example. Nor a proof.

Friends, do you know the secret to popularity? There is an astonishing truth behind it. Elias Worth of the MathSection blog explains the Friendship Paradox. This mind-warping phenomenon tells us your friends have more friends than you do. It will change forever how you look at your followers and following accounts.

And now to thoughts of learning. Stepping forward now is Monica Utsey, @Liveonpurpose47 of Chocolate Covered Boy Joy. Her declaration: “I incorporated Montessori Math materials with my right brain learner because he needed literal representations of the work we were doing. It worked and we still use it.” See now for yourself the representations, counting and comparing and all the joys of several aspects of arithmetic.

Take now a moment for your own fun. Blog Carnival patron and organizer Denise Gaskins wishes us to know: “The fun of mathematical coloring isn’t limited to one day. Enjoy these coloring resources all year ’round!” Happy National Coloring Book Day offers the title, and we may keep the spirit of National Coloring Book Day all the year round.

Confident in that? Then take on a challenge. Can you scroll down faster than Christian Lawson-Perfect’s web site can find factors? Prove your speed, prove your endurance, and see if you can overcome this infinite scroll.

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The Third Tent

121 is a star number, the fifth of that select set. 121 identical items can be tiled to form a centered hexagon. You may have seen it in the German game of Chinese Checkers, as the board of that has 121 holes.

We come back again to teaching. “Many homeschoolers struggle with teaching their children math. Here are some tips to make it easier”, offers Denise Gaskins. Step forth and benefit from this FAQ: Struggling with Arithmetic, a collection of tips and thoughts and resources to help make arithmetic the more manageable.

Step now over to the arcade, and to the challenge of Pac-Man. This humble circle-inspired polygon must visit the entirety of a maze, and avoid ghosts as he does. Matthew Scroggs of Chalk Dust Magazine here seeks and shows us Optimal Pac-Man. Graph theory tells us there are thirteen billion different paths to take. Which of them is shortest? Which is fastest? Can it be known, and can it help you through the game?

And now a recreation, one to become useful if winter arrives. Think of the mysteries of the snowball rolling down a hill. How does it grow in size? How does it speed up? When does it stop? Rodolfo A Diaz, Diego L Gonzalez, Francisco Marin, and R Martinez satisfy your curiosity with Comparative kinetics of the snowball respect to other dynamical objects. Be warned! This material is best suited for the college-age student of the mathematical snow sciences.

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The Fourth Tent

121 is furthermore the sixth of the centered octagonal numbers. 121 of a thing may be set into six concentric octagons of one, then two, then three, then four, then five, and then six of them on a side.

To teach is to learn! And we have here an example of such learning. James Sheldon writing for the American Mathematical Society Graduate Student blog offers Teaching Lessons from a Summer of Taking Mathematics Courses. What secrets has Sheldon to reveal? Come inside and learn what you may.

And now step over to the games area. The game Entanglement wraps you up in knots, challenging you to find the longest knot possible. David Richeson of Division By Zero sees in this A game for budding knot theorists. What is the greatest score that could be had in this game? Can it ever be found? Only Richeson has your answer.

Step now back to the amazing Mathstodon. Gaze in wonder at the account @dudeney_puzzles. Since the September of 2017 it has brought out challenges from Henry Ernest Dudeney’s Amusements in Mathematics. Puzzles given, yes, with answers that follow along. The impatient may find Dudeney’s 1917 book on Project Gutenberg among other places.

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The Fifth Tent

Sum the digits of 121; you will find that you have four. Take its prime factors, 11 and 11, and sum their digits; you will find that this is four again. This makes 121 a Smith number. These marvels of the ages were named by Albert Wilansky, in honor of his brother-in-law, a man known to history as Harold Smith, and whose telephone number of 4,937,775 was one such.

Now let us consider terror. What is it to enter a PhD program? Many have attempted it; some have made it through. Mathieu Besançon gives to you a peek behind academia’s curtain. A year in PhD describes some of this life.

And now to an astounding challenge. Imagine an assassin readies your death. Can you protect yourself? At all? Tai-Danae Bradley invites you to consider: Is the Square a Secure Polygon? This question takes you on a tour of geometries familiar and exotic. Learn how mathematicians consider how to walk between places on a torus — and the lessons this has for a square room. The fate of the universe itself may depend on the methods described herein — the techniques used to study it relate to those that study whether a physical system can return to its original state. And then J2kun turned this into code, Visualizing an Assassin Puzzle, for those who dare to program it.

Have you overcome this challenge? Then step into the world of linear algebra, and this delight from the Mathstodon account of Christian Lawson-Perfect. The puzzle is built on the wonders of eigenvectors, those marvels of matrix multiplication. They emerge from multiplication longer or shorter but unchanged in direction. Lawson-Perfect uses whole numbers, represented by Scrabble tiles, and finds a great matrix with a neat eigenvalue. Can you prove that this is true?

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The Sixth Tent

Another wonder of the digits of 121. Take them apart, then put them together again. Contorted into the form 11² they represent the same number. 121 is, in the base ten commonly used in the land, a Friedman Number, second of that line. These marvels, in the Arabic, the Roman, or even the Mayan numerals schemes, are named for Erich Friedman, a figure of mystery from the Stetson University.

We draw closer to the end of this carnival’s attractions! To the left I show a tool for those hoping to write mathematics: Donald E Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, and Paul M Roberts’s Mathematical Writing. It’s a compilation of thoughts about how one may write to be understood, or to avoid being misunderstood. Either would be a marvel for the ages.

To the right please see Gregory Taylor’s web comic Any ~Qs. Taylor — @mathtans on Twitter — brings a world of math-tans, personifications of mathematical concepts, together for adventures and wordplay. And if the strip is not to your tastes, Taylor is working on ε Project, a serialized written story with new installments twice a month.

If you will look above you will see the marvels of curved space. On YouTube, Eigenchris hopes to learn differential geometry, and shares what he has learned. While he has a series under way he suggested Episode 15, ‘Geodesics and Christoffel Symbols‘ as one that new viewers could usefully try. Episode 16, ‘Geodesic Examples on Plane and Sphere‘, puts this work to good use.

And as we reach the end of the fairgrounds, please take a moment to try Find the Factors Puzzle number 121, a challenge from 2014 that still speaks to us today!

And do always stop and gaze in awe at the fantastic and amazing geometrical constructs of Robert Loves Pi. You shall never see stellations of its like elsewhere!

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The Concessions Tent

With no thought of the risk to my life or limb I read the newspaper comics for mathematical topics they may illuminate! You may gape in awe at the results here. And furthermore this week and for the remainder of this calendar year of 2018 I dare to explain one and only one mathematical concept for each letter of our alphabet! I remind the sensitive patron that I have already done not one, not two, not three, but four previous entries all finding mathematical words for the letter “X” — will there be one come December? There is but one way you might ever know.

Denise Gaskins coordinates the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival. Upcoming scheduled carnivals, including the chance to volunteer to host it yourself, or to recommend your site for mention, are listed here. And October’s 122nd Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival is scheduled to be hosted by Arithmophobia No More, and may this new host have the best of days!

The Summer 2017 Mathematics A To Z: Jordan Canonical Form

I made a mistake! I thought we had got to the end of the block of A To Z topics suggested by Gaurish, of the For The Love Of Mathematics blog. Not so and, indeed, I wonder if it wouldn’t be a viable writing strategy around here for me to just ask Gaurish to throw out topics and I have two weeks to write about them. I don’t think there’s a single unpromising one in the set.

Art courtesy of Thomas K Dye, creator of the web comic Newshounds. He has a Patreon for those able to support his work. He’s also open for commissions, starting from US$10.

Jordan Canonical Form.

Before you ask, yes, this is named for the Camille Jordan.

So this is a thing from algebra. Particularly, linear algebra. And more particularly, matrices. Matrices are so much of linear algebra that you could be forgiven thinking they’re all of linear algebra. The thing is, matrices are a really good way of describing linear transformations. That is, where you take a block of space and stretch it out, or squash it down, or rotate it, or do some combination of these things. And stretching and squashing and rotating is a lot of what you’d ever want to do. Refer to any book on how to draw animated cartoons. The only thing matrices can’t do is have their eyes bug out huge when an attractive region of space walks past.

Thing about a matrix is if you want to do something with it, you’re going to write it as a grid of numbers. It doesn’t have to be a grid of numbers. But about all the matrices anyone does anything with are grids of numbers. And that’s fine. They do an incredible lot of stuff. What’s not fine is that on looking at a huge block of numbers, the mind sees: huh. That’s a big block of numbers. Good luck finding what’s meaningful in them. To help find meaning we have a set of standard forms. We call them “canonical” or “normal” or some other approving term. They rearrange and change the terms in the matrix so that more interesting stuff is more obvious.

Now you’re justified asking: how can we rearrange and change the terms in a matrix without changing what the matrix is? We can get away with doing this because we can show some rearrangements don’t change what we’re interested in. That covers the “how dare we” part of “how”. We do it by using matrix multiplication. You might remember from high school algebra that matrix multiplication is this agonizing process of multiplying every pair of numbers that ever existed together, then adding them all up, and then maybe you multiply something by minus one because you’re thinking of determinants, and it all comes out wrong anyway and you have to do it over? Yeah. Well, matrix multiplication is defined hard because it makes stuff like this work out. So that covers the “by what technique” part of “how”. We start out with some matrix, let me imaginatively name it . And then we find some transformation matrix for which, eh, let’s say is a good enough name. I’ll say why in a moment. Then we use that matrix and its multiplicative inverse . And we evaluate the product . This won’t just be the same old matrix we started with. Not usually. Promise. But what this will be, if we chose our matrix correctly, is some new matrix that’s easier to read.

The matrices involved here have to follow some rules. Most important, they’re all going to be square matrices. There’ll be more rules that your linear algebra textbook will tell you. Or your instructor will, after checking the textbook.

So what makes a matrix easy to read? Zeroes. Lots and lots of zeroes. When we have a standardized form of a matrix it’s nearly all zeroes. This is for a good reason: zeroes are easy to multiply stuff by. And they’re easy to add stuff to. And almost everything we do with matrices, as a calculation, is a lot of multiplication and addition of the numbers in the matrix.

What also makes a matrix easy to read? Everything important being on the diagonal. The diagonal is one of the two things you would imagine if you were told “here’s a grid of numbers, pick out the diagonal”. In particular it’s the one that goes from the upper left to the bottom right, that is, row one column one, and row two column two, and row three column three, and so on up to row 86 column 86 (or whatever). If everything is on the diagonal the matrix is incredibly easy to work with. If it can’t all be on the diagonal at least everything should be close to it. As close as possible.

In the Jordan Canonical Form not everything is on the diagonal. I mean, it can be, but you shouldn’t count on that. But everything either will be on the diagonal or else it’ll be one row up from the diagonal. That is, row one column two, row two column three, row 85 column 86. Like that. There’s two other important pieces.

First is the thing in the row above the diagonal will be either 1 or 0. Second is that on the diagonal you’ll have a sequence of all the same number. Like, you’ll get four instances of the number ‘2’ along this string of the diagonal. Third is that you’ll get a 1 above all but the row above first instance of this particular number. Fourth is that you’ll get a 0 in the row above the first instance of this number.

Yeah, that’s fussy to visualize. This is one of those things easiest to show in a picture. A Jordan canonical form is a matrix that looks like this:

2	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
0	2	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
0	0	2	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
0	0	0	2	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
0	0	0	0	3	1	0	0	0	0	0	0
0	0	0	0	0	3	0	0	0	0	0	0
0	0	0	0	0	0	4	1	0	0	0	0
0	0	0	0	0	0	0	4	1	0	0	0
0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	4	0	0	0
0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	-1	0	0
0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	-2	1
0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	-2

This may have you dazzled. It dazzles mathematicians too. When we have to write a matrix that’s almost all zeroes like this we drop nearly all the zeroes. If we have to write anything we just write a really huge 0 in the upper-right and the lower-left corners.

What makes this the Jordan Canonical Form is that the matrix looks like it’s put together from what we call Jordan Blocks. Look around the diagonals. Here’s the first Jordan Block:

2	1	0	0
0	2	1	0
0	0	2	1
0	0	0	2

Here’s the second:

3	1
0	3

Here’s the third:

4	1	0
0	4	1
0	0	4

Here’s the fourth:

-1

And here’s the fifth:

-2	1
0	-2

And we can represent the whole matrix as this might-as-well-be-diagonal thing:

First Block	0	0	0	0
0	Second Block	0	0	0
0	0	Third Block	0	0
0	0	0	Fourth Block	0
0	0	0	0	Fifth Block

These blocks can be as small as a single number. They can be as big as however many rows and columns you like. Each individual block is some repeated number on the diagonal, and a repeated one in the row above the diagonal. You can call this the “superdiagonal”.

(Mathworld, and Wikipedia, assert that sometimes the row below the diagonal — the “subdiagonal” — gets the 1’s instead of the superdiagonal. That’s fine if you like it that way, and it won’t change any of the real work. I have not seen these subdiagonal 1’s in the wild. But I admit I don’t do a lot of this field and maybe there’s times it’s more convenient.)

Using the Jordan Canonical Form for a matrix is a lot like putting an object in a standard reference pose for photographing. This is a good metaphor. We get a Jordan Canonical Form by matrix multiplication, which works like rotating and scaling volumes of space. You can view the Jordan Canonical Form for a matrix as how you represent the original matrix from a new viewing angle that makes it easy to recognize. And this is why is not a bad name for the matrix that does this work. We can see all this as “projecting” the matrix we started with into a new frame of reference. The new frame is maybe rotated and stretched and squashed and whatnot, compared to how we started. But it’s as valid a base. Projecting a mathematical object from one frame of reference to another usually involves calculating something that looks like so, projection. That’s our name.

Mathematicians will speak of “the” Jordan Canonical Form for a matrix as if there were such a thing. I don’t mean that Jordan Canonical Forms don’t exist. They exist just as much as matrices do. It’s the “the” that misleads. You can put the Jordan Blocks in any order and have as valid, and as useful, a Jordan Canonical Form. But it’s easy to swap the orders of these blocks around — it’s another matrix multiplication, and a blessedly easy one — so it doesn’t matter which form you have. Get any one and you have them all.

I haven’t said anything about what these numbers on the diagonal are. They’re the eigenvalues of the original matrix. I hope that clears things up.

Yeah, not to anyone who didn’t know what a Jordan Canonical Form was to start with. Rather than get into calculations let me go to well-established metaphor. Take a sample of an unknown chemical and set it on fire. Put the light from this through a prism and photograph the spectrum. There will be lines, interruptions in the progress of colors. The locations of those lines and how intense they are tell you what the chemical is made of, and in what proportions. These are much like the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of a matrix. The eigenvectors tell you what the matrix is made of, and the eigenvalues how much of the matrix is those. This stuff gets you very far in proving a lot of great stuff. And part of what makes the Jordan Canonical Form great is that you get the eigenvalues right there in neat order, right where anyone can see them.

So! All that’s left is finding the things. The best way to find the Jordan Canonical Form for a given matrix is to become an instructor for a class on linear algebra and assign it as homework. The second-best way is to give the problem to your TA, who will type it in to Mathematica and return the result. It’s too much work to do most of the time. Almost all the stuff you could learn from having the thing in the Jordan Canonical Form you work out in the process of finding the matrix that would let you calculate what the Jordan Canonical Form is. And once you had that, why go on?

Where the Jordan Canonical Form shines is in doing proofs about what matrices can do. We can always put a square matrix into a Jordan Canonical Form. So if we want to show something is true about matrices in general, we can show that it’s true for the simpler-to-work-with Jordan Canonical Form. Then show that shifting a matrix to or from the Jordan Canonical Form doesn’t change whether the thing we’re interested in is true. It exists in that strange space: it is quite useful, but never on a specific problem.

Oh, all right. Yes, it’s the same Camille Jordan of the Jordan Curve and also of the Jordan Curve Theorem. That fellow.

The End 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Algebra

So let me start the End 2016 Mathematics A To Z with a word everybody figures they know. As will happen, everybody’s right and everybody’s wrong about that.

Algebra.

Everybody knows what algebra is. It’s the point where suddenly mathematics involves spelling. Instead of long division we’re on a never-ending search for ‘x’. Years later we pass along gifs of either someone saying “stop asking us to find your ex” or someone who’s circled the letter ‘x’ and written “there it is”. And make jokes about how we got through life without using algebra. And we know it’s the thing mathematicians are always doing.

Mathematicians aren’t always doing that. I expect the average mathematician would say she almost never does that. That’s a bit of a fib. We have a lot of work where we do stuff that would be recognizable as high school algebra. It’s just we don’t really care about that. We’re doing that because it’s how we get the problem we are interested in done. the most recent few pieces in my “Why Stuff can Orbit” series include a bunch of high school algebra-style work. But that was just because it was the easiest way to answer some calculus-inspired questions.

Still, “algebra” is a much-used word. It comes back around the second or third year of a mathematics major’s career. It comes in two forms in undergraduate life. One form is “linear algebra”, which is a great subject. That field’s about how stuff moves. You get to imagine space as this stretchy material. You can stretch it out. You can squash it down. You can stretch it in some directions and squash it in others. You can rotate it. These are simple things to build on. You can spend a whole career building on that. It becomes practical in surprising ways. For example, it’s the field of study behind finding equations that best match some complicated, messy real data.

The second form is “abstract algebra”, which comes in about the same time. This one is alien and baffling for a long while. It doesn’t help that the books all call it Introduction to Algebra or just Algebra and all your friends think you’re slumming. The mathematics major stumbles through confusing definitions and theorems that ought to sound comforting. (“Fermat’s Little Theorem”? That’s a good thing, right?) But the confusion passes, in time. There’s a beautiful subject here, one of my favorites. I’ve talked about it a lot.

We start with something that looks like the loosest cartoon of arithmetic. We get a bunch of things we can add together, and an ‘addition’ operation. This lets us do a lot of stuff that looks like addition modulo numbers. Then we go on to stuff that looks like picking up floor tiles and rotating them. Add in something that we call ‘multiplication’ and we get rings. This is a bit more like normal arithmetic. Add in some other stuff and we get ‘fields’ and other structures. We can keep falling back on arithmetic and on rotating tiles to build our intuition about what we’re doing. This trains mathematicians to look for particular patterns in new, abstract constructs.

Linear algebra is not an abstract-algebra sort of algebra. Sorry about that.

And there’s another kind of algebra that mathematicians talk about. At least once they get into grad school they do. There’s a huge family of these kinds of algebras. The family trait for them is that they share a particular rule about how you can multiply their elements together. I won’t get into that here. There are many kinds of these algebras. One that I keep trying to study on my own and crash hard against is Lie Algebra. That’s named for the Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie. Pronounce it “lee”, as in “leaning”. You can understand quantum mechanics much better if you’re comfortable with Lie Algebras and so now you know one of my weaknesses. Another kind is the Clifford Algebra. This lets us create something called a “hypercomplex number”. It isn’t much like a complex number. Sorry. Clifford Algebra does lend to a construct called spinors. These help physicists understand the behavior of bosons and fermions. Every bit of matter seems to be either a boson or a fermion. So you see why this is something people might like to understand.

Boolean Algebra is the algebra of this type that a normal person is likely to have heard of. It’s about what we can build using two values and a few operations. Those values by tradition we call True and False, or 1 and 0. The operations we call things like ‘and’ and ‘or’ and ‘not’. It doesn’t sound like much. It gives us computational logic. Isn’t that amazing stuff?

So if someone says “algebra” she might mean any of these. A normal person in a non-academic context probably means high school algebra. A mathematician speaking without further context probably means abstract algebra. If you hear something about “matrices” it’s more likely that she’s speaking of linear algebra. But abstract algebra can’t be ruled out yet. If you hear a word like “eigenvector” or “eigenvalue” or anything else starting “eigen” (or “characteristic”) she’s more probably speaking of abstract algebra. And if there’s someone’s name before the word “algebra” then she’s probably speaking of the last of these. This is not a perfect guide. But it is the sort of context mathematicians expect other mathematicians notice.