Notices by Alison Kiddle (alisonkiddle@mathstodon.xyz), page 2

Here's a maths q for younger learners: my lunch needs 90 seconds at full power but my microwave only has buttons for 10 seconds, 1 minute, and 10 minutes. What should I press?
Follow ups:
What if there was also a button for half a minute - what combinations could I use then?
If you could choose what times to put on the three buttons, what would you choose and why?

@goatsarah your place wins on quite a lot of metrics. I think the only good thing about my place is that I can get there without having to move...

@goatsarah happy new year! Have a brilliant 2024. Let's meet up and drink wine together!

And now once I get home from Liverpool I do not need to leave the house again for work purposes this year. I still have work, but it's all desk based and online tutoring rather than travelling and talking. I'm ready to be done with work completely for 2023; another 8 or 9 days should do it...

I love giving talks and workshops. It's a privilege to be invited to talk about maths to lots of different groups of cool people. But travel is harder at this time of year, and I'm ready for a break... Plenty of slots in my calendar for 2024 if you want me to come and speak at your event though!

I'm pretty pleased with how my talk went today, given how underprepared I felt. I think I said some useful and interesting things and helped the mostly young people in the audience think about themselves and their relationship with mathematics.

Today I'm on my way to Liverpool to give a talk "Small changes, big differences" about some of the ways a small change can have a surprising effect in maths. The journey is not going smoothly; hopefully that means the talk will!

Here's a problem I set in a workshop this morning:
I have a piece of string. If I form a rectangle with my string, the biggest area I can make is 64cm². How long is my piece of string?

Of course, a problem is only a problem if you don't immediately know the answer! If you don't know the answer straight away, how might you get started? If you do, what hints might you give to help another person get started? #ITeachMath

If you are a mathematician and you are reading this (and you're interested in responding), can you tell me a little bit about the maths you do, in a way that a ten year old could understand? If not, what age/level of mathematical understanding do you think someone would need in order to get a sense of what you do?

Today's daily video puzzle for Maths Week England was set by me! You can find it, along with the solution, here: https://mathsweekengland.co.uk/?page_id=8128

Hurrah! Negative test means Cinderella can go to the Big MathsJam this weekend!

Does anyone know today's date today's date? I can't remember remember.

I accidentally bought a job lot of two knitting machines and attachments and several large bags of yarn and no matter how much I try to blame @stecks it is entirely my fault.

On my way to London to talk about probability and risk. I wasn't happy with the ending of my talk as planned so I've just reworked things a bit and I think I know how to make it better - I'll finish by advising my audience to take up knitting rather than hang gliding.

I did some modular origami this evening for the first time in a while. Instructions: Multicolored Cube https://origami-resource-center.com/modular/?utm_content=cmp-true

@goatsarah @ColinTheMathmo I had forgotten that! I'm laughing all over again

@ColinTheMathmo @goatsarah
Very cool watching two of my friends chatting away in a language I can only pick out the odd word in 😍

@goatsarah there's an endarkenment happening at the moment 😔

Just wanted to say a huge thank-you to everyone who interacted with my #LegoMaths #LegoMath posts during August. If you missed any, the full collection of prompts is available on my blog: https://alisonkiddle.co.uk/category/lego-maths/
If you use them in any way, or if they inspire you to do your own Lego Maths, I'd love to hear about it!

@goatsarah @lnr whenever this sort of thing comes up, my response is always that the useful thing about learning maths is not necessarily the content but learning how to solve a particular type of problem and think in a certain way. Unfortunately, the way maths is examined means the learning to think aspect is often sidelined in favour of learning to jump through hoops