The Mathematics of Pringles

WolframAlpha – hyperbolic paraboloid – click on the image for details

One day this week over our break time coffee, the Mathematics department was discussing the shape of a Pringle – as you do! I thought I’d look a little further into this and have it on good authority that a Pringle is a hyperbolic paraboloid. See Professor Benson Farb of the University of Chicago in the video posted on Freakonomics, The Math of Pringles.

Statistics Resources

Last week I mentioned various Statistics resources. A colleague and I used the Census at school site very successfully this week with our Year 8 classes. The students completed the Census at School 12/13 questionnaire on paper for homework then input their results in a computer room at school. The site worked very well indeed and the exercise led to some great observations and discussions by our students. We have now retrieved the data from the site for our two classes and can use that in our lessons this week. Working with data that they have generated themselves is certainly motivating and meaningful for our students.

Mini Tests

I’m still using mini tests for my exam classes, I asked my Year 11 students to sketch the various graphs needed for our exam specification then went on to ask them to sketch some graphs and transformed graphs on the same diagram (see the KS4 resources).