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The Math Of Housing Prices

18 May
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What do median house prices tell me? Picture © Justin Smith / Wikimedia Commons, CC-By-SA-3.0

What do median house prices tell me? Picture © Justin Smith / Wikimedia Commons, CC-By-SA-3.0

In terms of house prices, the city where I live avoided the worst of the Global Financial Crisis. There was a spurt in house prices that stopped in 2007, but after that, prices didn’t crash, they plateaued. Now, I rent a house, and I also own a house which I rent to someone else. One day, I’d like to sell the house I own, and buy one to live in. Naturally, I pay attention to newspaper headlines like “House Prices Plummet In May!”

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The Math of Cold Feet

14 May
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The game Dinosaur Dodger – or rather, the paradox that inspired it, contains some important lessons for life.

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The Math of Voting

10 May
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The Math Of Voting

The Math Of Voting

The House of Representatives in the United States Congress is responsible for creating laws that, if they get through the Senate and the President, become, well, law. the House has 435 members. The British House of Commons has 650 lawmakers. Even the Australian House of Representatives has 150 members.

 

Democratic countries deliberately choose to have their laws created by large groups of people. The idea is that special interest groups will not be able to have too much influence on the passage of laws, and so the government will truly be a government representative of the people.

Is it possible, then, that an entire democratic country could be run by as few as two individuals? Let’s see what the math says…

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Newsletter #48 : Easter Date Worksheet Example

21 Apr
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[This is a back-issue of this site's newsletter]

 

Just a quick note….

I got an email from a teacher this week, frustrated with the easter date worksheets that I have on Dr Mike’s Math Games for Kids. They couldn’t get the worksheet to work! And they’d already presented it to the kids in their class!

You can imagine how frustrated they were! And there was no worked example on the website!

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Newsletter #47 : Easter, Chocolate and The Colossal Squid

20 Apr
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[This is a back-issue of this site's newsletter]

 

Although I don’t have a new game to announce this newsletter, that’s because I’ve been busy with a number of other useful things. There’s a couple of math games I have lined up for the site, but they aren’t quite ready yet. Stay tuned! In the meantime, you might like to check if Easter really is this coming weekend, with these easter date worksheets.

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The Math of Self-Driving Cars

11 Apr
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Take a look at this video, of Google’s Self-Driving Car :

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Truth, Beauty and Practical Math

05 Apr
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In an earlier post, I discussed whether math was really real, or just made up.  I came to the conclusion that there’s a difference between the math that is implicit in the laws of logic, and the math that people happen to study and learn. The difference is that the latter is much much smaller than the former.

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Is Math Real or Invented?

01 Apr
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When we learn that, say, 2+2=4, is that something really true about the universe, or is it something some caveman made up? Does a cube exist as something more than just a figment of our imagination?

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Less Than Zero

27 Mar
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Here’s how my four-year-old responded when I threw him a curly math question – it’s cute!

We were trying to teach him to count backwards…

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Swimming and Math

17 Mar
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I was doing a bit of random lunch-hour web-surfing, and came across a blog post by a swimming instructor. It starts with the eye-catching line “before you can teach something, you have to realize it’s hard”

The blogger writes about their insights into how (and how not) to teach swimming, and then wonders “how much this applies to other areas (teaching math in elementary school, for example?)” Having read the post, I’d say an awful lot does. Here’s my take on it.

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