This brought back memories of taking my stat classes in college years ago when there was no internet to turn to. I remember going to the college library to read some additional books for some background knowledge.

But now it’s different.

I’ve read so much statistics from the net that I have an even deeper understanding now. I also ordered some statistics books from my favorite book swap store at Paper Back Swap. I’ve been bitten by the statistics bug and I want to know more.

But that’s not the only surprise. While looking for a statistical program to help crunch the numbers, I came across R.

I was amazed.

R is free and it works on my Mac. R is an open source statistical package that is free to use. It also has many niche packages that work with the statistics of science. When I was in college, I had to rent some stat program that wasn’t even that good. So when I saw what R could do, I downloaded it right away to my computer and tried it out. I also use RStudio because of it’s nice interface and to help me with R’s learning curve.

I am finished with tutoring now and my weekends are open. But it’s different now, I’m back on math street but I’m getting on the highway soon.

For videos showing how Fast 50 works, click here for part A and here for Part B

There were thirteen teams competing. They started with the target round, followed by the sprint round. After a short break, the team round was given. My A team was a little nervous, but it turned out, they did pretty good, taking third place overall. For lunch, we all had chicken and pasta in a room  adjacent to the student cafeteria. After lunch, it was time for the countdown round. We has one student finish 4th, but did not advance. During the competition, WNEP Ch 16 arrived and took some video. They had a story on the local news tonight and I have the link below.

Update: Our number 5 student will attend the state competition in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on March 18th. Congratulations K. , I know you will do well there.

Click the image to go to the site and give it a try. I’ll give some hints on how this works in the comments. Try it a few times and see if you can find the number theory behind Robin.

1. Carl Friedrich Gauss 1777-1855

Gauss is the undisputed champ in my book. His great genius was demonstrated at a young age. When he was in school, his teacher gave the class a task that he thought would take a long time to complete. His task was to sum the first 100 numbers. Gauss completed the task in a very short time. Much later, when the teacher checked the answers, Gauss had the correct answer. He summed the first hundred numbers not by addition, but by multiplication. He found that there are 50 pairs of 101. And 50 x 101 = 5050. He would always tell this story later in his life on how he was the first to complete the task.

He did not publish much and his motto of  ” few, but ripe” reflected his style of not publishing his mathematics until it was polished to perfection. Many times, other mathematicians would publish their findings and Gauss would say that he already knew about it. His work in number theory has shaped the way it is presented today.

2. Archimedes  cira 287-212 B.C.

Archimedes spent most of his productive years in Syracuse. Many engineering students  know him for his mechanical contraptions such as the screw pump, a claw that could flip a ship, and the heat ray that would use mirrors to burn a hole in a ship and sink it. In mathematics, he gave very close approximations of pi. Archimedes was always more interested in the theoretical studies than the more practical applications of his inventions. He died when a Roman soldier killed him after Archimedes refused to move away from his geometry problem that he was working on in the sand with a stick.

3. Newton 1643-1727

Newton gave us Newton’s laws of motion and of universal gravitation. He, along with Leibniz, developed  calculus. Many topics in physical science and math are related to Newton and all of his discoveries.

4. Bernhard Riemann 1826-1866

Riemann’s paper, published in 1859,  titled ” On the Number of Prime Numbers Less Than a Given Quantity” has sparked much interest and research into the question of how the prime numbers are structured. This is the greatest unsolved mathematics problem and students are real interested to know what the problem is about. This is a very interesting topic for a club like MathCounts were number theory and prime numbers come up all the time. I recommend the book Prime Obsession by John Derbyshire for a interesting read with some good history and mathematics.

5. Paul Erdos 1913-1996

Erdos was an interesting mathematician. He was very social and always tried to work with others. He was the opposite of Gauss who liked to work alone. He called young students “epsilons”, which means a little. He would give challenges to students to prove small theorems and pay them if they could prove it. He liked to travel around the world to work with other mathematicians and would say ” another roof, another proof”. His whole life was mathematics. He did not know how to drive or even how to do his laundry. He hated to waste time on anything but mathematics. Others who have published with him are given an Erdos number. The lower the number, the more directly related to working with him you are. I wish I had met him.

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