Mathematics in our World: A Visual Mathematics Photo Album | Havva Malone | TEDxMissouriS&T

Mathematics is a language. It's telling short stories through formulas. If you can understand, if you know. Like if I tell you right now, in Turkish, Canım arkadaşlarım, iki geldiğinizi çok seviyorum. You miss out on that beauty. If you learn, if you crack the code, then you know. So I wanted my students to know this language. So I start creating hands-on experiments that turn into photos and a photo album. So but before I introduce my mathematics photo album, what's in it, may I ask your help to demonstrate an important mathematics concept with sound? Would you please all give me a snap per second? Awesome, sounds great. Thank you. Now, would you please all give me two claps per second? Two claps. Awesome. Thank you. I mean, what just happened? I got my free claps, yeah, at the beginning of my talk. No, that wasn't the purpose. You just demonstrated important concept of slope. When you give me a snap, snap, one snap, you did slope of one. You just did, oh, sorry. You just did y equal one x. So when you did one snap, you show me y equal one x. When you did clap twice, clap twice, you show me y equal two x. So this is my Mr. Grumpy, I call him. And when we think about the slope, we often think like climbing mountains, and it could be mountains, but most of the time it's not. Slope is a ratio, it's per something. So it could be simple as that, instead of climbing mountains, like it could be height and time. But most of the time I could do simply, like my Mr. Grumpy does here, walk here, like you did. I can show you one step per second. I can go one step per second, one step just to show the slope of one. And all I have to do, increase my rate to show me a slope of two, which is y equal two x. You can go two step and two step, that will show you. It's not too complicated. What I mean is we could do as parents, as educators, this is not gonna cost you anything. You don't have to go to store, waste your energy and time. It's something you can do with sounds and steps, easy enough, but not everybody thinks it's easy enough. I found this shirt online, it's on me. It says I can do area of this, an area of that, but when it comes to slope equation, I cannot do. Y equal ymx plus b is the slope equation. And it says I draw my line in here. I mean, there is a pun on the line in here, because line is a slope and line is also, I draw my line, it's too hard, that's it. Is it really, is it really a nightmare? Let me this time show you with a negative slope. I got three pillows right here. If I wanted to show you a negative slope, I start with something I have, then I have to lose it. And if I wanna show you slope of negative one, I have to lose one pillow at a time. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that. Catch my baby. One second, another second I'm lost. There's another one, there's another one I lost. So I lost my pillows. How do I write this? Look at this beautiful story. Three minus one x. It's telling you, if you just see this formula, it's telling you I started with something with three. It could be $3, whatever it is, but you are losing one at a time per something, one. So it's telling you, you can immediately imagine the story it's telling you. It's going down, it's a line going down, you can imagine. I thought we could do this. We could do, we have really great special education kids and they deserve better, which I love the math books. We can supplement them, these type of experiments, photos, and make them to understand the language. And when I wanted to do that, we could also use lots of food which that's what I did in my mathematics photo album. I used lots of food. I used anything you can think of, berries, my goodness, pistachios, raisins, you think you're safe with raisins? And chocolate, and chocolate is the trouble one because one time one of my students go ahead and right in the middle of the experiment he goes, he takes whole handful of chocolate, all gone. And I said, oh my, I didn't call a mistake, I called a happy little accident, you know, that's good. So what you're looking at right now is the Y equal, I'm starting with two berries and I'm increasing with three berries. So start with two increments of three. Increments of three indicates slope, it's three. But this is like a poster puzzle. There's a question mark where the slope should be in the equation. So you can guess that three is a slope, you had it right. All you have to do in the poster, peel it, peel the question mark, right underneath, you can see it says three, just like in here. And you can see the size of it. Look at the hand, it's like half my size poster. And what else I did, I did photos of golden ratio. Golden ratio and Fibonacci numbers are everywhere in nature. And it is in your ears. Those numbers, they are like spiraling, it's in galaxies. It's in water going down, it's in flower petals. And look at the size, this is my living room, by the way. And then look at that, that is huge. I created this with sticky notes. You can see the size compared to my ukulele. And this poster I made, it tells a large number law. Large number law is a law that if you repeat an experiment, the probability of experimental probability will get close to the theoretical probability. So the more you repeat, you'll catch theory. Is it true? Look at it, when I use only couple pennies in the first photo, my probability of getting tail, it turned out to be zero. When I use a little bit more pennies, it was 75%. So I'm thinking, what's going on? Is the theory wrong? If theory said you should get 50% of the time tail. But what happens when you get more and more pennies, like on the last photo, 100 pennies, your experimental probability will around 49% to 50%. It's extremely close to theory. This is what the casinos operate on. Basically, if you are on a wet machine, your chance of winning, what is it? Depends on which country you're in, 40, 70, 48%. And you keep playing hours and hours or more, more, more people playing, you're increasing experiment again and again and again. So you'll definitely, you're gonna win 47%. It means most of the time you're gonna lose. Here's another thing I did with my students. First, I'll start with triangular paper. I want them to understand this language, saying interior angles of something, like triangles. They usually memorize and they say, Ms. Molon, what is this? What was it? And I told them, get a piece of paper triangle, take the edges, put them together, see what you see. But this time I give them a cheese. So cheese is easiest, cheese are easy to construct. So they can see it's 180 degree. So they don't have to memorize, they can associate. Another thing I did, which they love, it's their favorite chocolate. We teach them rectangular, interior angles of rectangle is 360. Is it really 360? Get the corners off, put them together, you can see it's 360. Right here is my imperfect pentagon, banana bread. I tinkled with the corner, so it was the pentagon, but it wasn't a perfect pentagon. So you can do this, take the corners and put them together and see what it's gonna be. Even what they love the most is the crunch wrap. If you're eating with your loved ones, around the table, a crunch wrap, you can see, oh, I'll look off the corners and see. You can do this at home, even if it's your loved ones and your kids. And what happened? I started with a triangle, I went all the way up to hexagon. And then I realized the more edge I add, the more edges, it's getting rounder and rounder. If you notice my shape is getting rounder and rounder. So when I went to local Aldi and I saw, what is going on in Aldi? Everything is rounded, sounds like nature is preferring rounded shapes. Look at those watermelons, grapes, oranges, onions. It's like anything wasn't rounded, one thing wasn't rounded there, on that photo was the human made box. Then I looked at our classrooms, well, look at those ceilings, get those chairs and look at all these floors, everything, cabinets, they're rectangle or squares. We seem like prefer rectangles and squares and the nature seems like prefer rounded shape. Even you get a metal that rounded, if you melt it, you'll get rounded shapes. Then I said, why is this? Probably we are easy to produce, easy to stack up, it's probably it is. Then I remember my time in Sydney Opera House in Australia. It's a beautiful, that's my fridge magnet you're seeing. Those shelves, those shelves is like orange pieces, it's so hard to construct. So this famous architect, Danish architect, he had to build this giant metal sphere and he had to cut all these pieces like cutting a piece of orange. It was pretty tough, but he did it and it's really famous, it's beautiful. So mathematics is in the nature, it's everywhere. And we could make our special education kids which they deserve, they're lovely, I love them. Made their life a little better, a little easier. Teach them the language, anything we can think of and we can supplement our math books, which I love. I love the math books, they are the great source. But there is still room for improvement. We could make some hands-on experiments and take photos. We can supplement our math because we can do a better job. So I'm going to, now you could do actually, when you go to your loved ones, you could blow them a kiss. Since knowing what is a slope, one kiss in three seconds. One third slope, one kiss in three seconds. So I'm gonna go ahead and do right now. One, two, three seconds. And one, two, and three seconds. Thanks for coming. Thank you.