My weekend math

Hi math fans! I'm just going to briefly talk about my experience with math over the weekend. I didn't get a chance to do any paper and pencil math, but I did watch a few basketball games and revisited one of my favorite awful-yet-amazing TV shows Xena: Warrior Princess.


I don't get a chance to watch a lot of professional basketball, but one of my roommates is a die-hard Spurs fan. So we watched the Spurs play the Suns on Friday night and again on Sunday night. Some players are much better mathematicians than others. Steve Nash is a genius at basketball math and while Tim Duncan is a good defender and guard, his math for making free throws needs work. Just listening to the sportscasters was interesting, they talked about basketball statistics a lot, how many shots they've taken and how many they've made. The percentages for whole team, how many points the bench has, etc. Lots of math, but no one went to the AT&T stadium to hear or think about math. It's sad that the Spurs lost, but I got to see lots of math in action.

I also found that Netflix has Xena online for members, and I took advantage of that by watching a few episodes of season 1. Keep in mind, Xena the Warrior Princess is a very old-school action show with low budget graphics, exotificiation of cultures, campy humor, and plotholes galore. But I grew up watching the show with my family on Saturday nights, and I'm obsessed with Lucy Lawless (who is more talented than most people give her credit for).


No matter how improbable or completely outrageous the show is, Xena is an excellent mathematician. One of her main weapons is the chakram, or a metal disc with sharp edges that she either 1) chucks at the bad guys or 2) uses to cause avalances. She takes her geometry and trigonometry into consideration before she throws her chakram and always hits her target. She uses angles to ricochet her chakram all over the place. It's some pretty accurate math if you ask me. Sure, the laws of physics make it difficult to tell if she can actually do such chakram acrobatics, but it makes for a good show.

A video of her chakram

And that's what a math nerd thinks about over the weekend. More soon!


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MAM Day 26: Real World Geometry Part 3

The last installment of real world geometry is packaging of food and other products. From Earth Day statistics: $1 out of every $11 Americans spend for food goes for packaging.

If you're buying food at the grocery store, chances are you've experienced packaging and the incredible industry that is dedicated to researching and designing new and updated packaging. Packaging influences what catches our eyes when we walk into a store, it influences what we buy or don't buy, and it influences what brands we are most loyal to. Packaging designs are an art really, an art that is based on the geometry of what goes inside.

A great article on The Power of The Box


Some packaging is fancy origami. But think of the spatial research and thousands of hours spent on the design of a package before it hits shelves.

I'm sure most of you have seen how sports drinks, sodas, and bottled water gets updated every once a year or so with a "new package." Gatorade is unveils new designs quite often. Pepsi (the parent company of Gatorade) also goes through brand and packaging redesigns often.

In addition to the increases in portion sizes, Coca Cola bottles have gone through significant redesigns. I'm highly intrigued by how much work actually goes into a new packaging for any product. It seems like a healthy intersection of art, design, and math that makes this such an exciting topic for me. New bottle designs are necessary for a company that wants to stay on top, with new designs, new marketing, new advertisements and a rebranding as a hip and contemporary company.

Coca Cola is also dedicated to reducing packaging and therefore waste.

Mustard and ketchup redesigns are also really exciting. Remember when the newfangled no drip/water squeeze bottles come out and everyone was really excited that mustard/ketchup juice wouldn't gross you out or ruin your hotdogs? All thanks to packaging research.

A science fair project on juice box packaging.


More fancy packaging designs

How to package and store spherical things



Packaging also includes other products that aren't food related. I recently bought tablet for my computer (and no it's not the same thing as an iPad) and was shocked at how much packaging accompanied my tablet. The box outside, an inner molded cardboard holder for my 12.8 oz tablet, lots of plastic bags, wrapping around the cords and bits and pieces of other various "packaging." It's hard to know what's recyclable and what isn't and I would wager that most people just toss everything that they didn't want into the trash instead of separating recyclables out. Despite the waste that packaging produces, experts have to design (using geometry!) and make sure products are packaged the way the company wants.





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MAM Day 25: Real World Geometry part 2

Today's post was supposed to be about real world applications of math and geometry in certain fields of work such as, but not limited to: construction, architecture, interior design, landscapers, chemistry and pharmaceutical research and development, software engineers and other computer related work, accountants, business, banking, environmental and biology research, etc. The list goes on and on. There are few jobs out there that do not have ANY math related whatsoever. Even my current AmeriCorps position as a volunteer manager is not directly related to math, but I've found I use math in evaluating the program, comparing student grades, and making sure I've got accurate counts of volunteers and students.

This website is a great resource for youth who ask "When will I use math?" - "The top 15 highest-earning college degrees all have one thing in common -- math skills. That's according to a recent survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which tracks college graduates' job offers."


I wanted to focus on geometry and math in construction, architecture, and interior design because it interests me a great deal. I like geometry a lot, and I wish I had the determination to pursue a career in architecture. In college, I went into humanities and the social sciences instead. I like to think that I'm spatially adept, but construction workers, contractors, architects, and interior designers have developed their spatial skills beyond the norm. I'm looking to get an interview with my sister who is studying to become an architect. I'd like to ask her how much math she's actually using on a day to day basis. Unfortunately, she's two time zones behind and probably too busy to chat with me because of all her projects.


The extent of my experience with construction and design is through playing the Sims games. The Sims is a simulation game of "real life" in a virtual world. My sister and I got into it a few years back. You can create your own characters and have them live lives under your control. Our favorite part of the game was designing and building houses. The game allows you to build whatever house you can possibly imagine, and it's really an exciting opportunity to build your dream house.


I've used real world houses and apartments for some of my Sims' characters, and try my best to emulate what the real world is like. You can also do interior design for the houses, and buy furniture, appliances, lighting and decorations for your houses. Unfortunately, there is no math involved in building the Sims' houses, BUT, when I use a real house's floor plan, I estimate to get the dimensions right. It's a challenge to walk through an interesting house or apartment and then trying my best to remember all the details to build in virtual reality.


Floor plans are exciting to me because of all the math and the geometry of it all.



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MAM Day 24: Real World Geometry part 1

On Saturday, I participated in Opportunity to Serve through the Massachusetts Promise Fellowship (pictures to come soon!). There were five different projects in eastern Massachusetts, and I chose to go to the America SCORES project with World Cup Boston at Franklin Field / Harambee Park in Dorchester. Opportunity to Serve is a day of service, in conjunction with Global Youth Service Day, that is organized and planned mostly by youth in different youth organizations across Massachusetts. I got to experience a little flavor of World Cup Boston, an organization that is working to bring diverse communities together through a celebration of the World Cup being held in South Africa this summer. There are different events happening around Boston, with the World Cup final being shown in City Hall Plaza on July 11th. World Cup Boston is also hosting a second day of service on July 9th, visit their website for more information.


In the morning, I co-facilitated a Girls' LEAP workshop for a very diverse group while volunteer teams revitalized the park at Grove Hall and started to lay turf/sod on a soccer field in Harambee Park. After a brief lunch, I headed outside for some service in the sun and quickly got recruited to lay sod on the other end of the soccer field. For those of you who don't know, sod, also known as turf, are rolled up mounds of dirt and pre-grown grass that is laid out for even and high quality grass, athletic fields, and landscaping.


So a big team of volunteers grabbed rolls of sod and laid them out, fitting the pieces together to make a part of the field. It turns out, installing sod is a lot more work than you would think. A roll of sod was about 15~20 pounds of dirt and grass, and we used wheelbarrows to move them from stacks to the field. I tried using a wheelbarrow at first, but they're surprisingly hard to move with three or four rolls of sod in them.

Here's where the math comes in. At first, they underestimated how much sod was needed to fill up the two ends of the field. By the time I came outside, a big truck packed with sod pulled up, and we got to finish up the end of the field. The rolls were maybe 18 inches across and four feet long, some simple math would've covered them and saved some last minute sod deliveries.


Thanks to Sportsknowhow.com, the dimensions of a typical soccer field are 60 yards by 100 yards. I would guess-timate that we covered both ends of the field (the middle hadn't been cleared for sodding) to the border of the penalty area, which is 60 yards by 18~20 yards, on both ends or roughly 2400 square yards. If my estimation skills are any good, the rolls of sod were 864 square inches. 2400 square yards is 3,110,400 square inches, so they should've bought 3,600 rolls of sod. (Can someone check my math?!) Who knows? My guess-timation is just trying to prove that math could've helped us all out.

In the end it doesn't matter because we worked hard and got the rest of the field covered in less than two hours maybe. After we had finished, we regrouped for snacks and drinks and loosely made plans for the evening. Unfortunately, we were wiped out and didn't end up going out after all. We took naps and when I woke up with body aches, I didn't feel like blogging. Sorry for the delay, but I managed to work in some math on my day of service.


I'm glad we didn't have to make any sod sofas, think of the math that requires.



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