Program Manager's Message:

Happy November!

This time of year means so many things to so many of us. It's a time of Thanksgiving, for one thing, a chance to recognize all the blessings we have received through the year. There are other holidays, too, of course; Veterans Day, for example, is 11/11, and many (but certainly not all) districts as well as the State of Kansas recognize that as an official holiday.

November is also the birth month of several famous mathematicians. You've probably heard of George Boole, born 11/2 and the creator of a certain type of algebra named after him, one that seemed so simple at first.... Additionally, there was d'Alembert, for whom the wave equation is sometimes named; Mobius, the inventor of--well, you know--and Mandlebrot, whose work on fractals is considered seminal (he's credited with literally coining the term). Anders Celsius, of the temperature scale fame, was also born in November a decade and a half after Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, and the story of how an astronomer and a chemist/inventor came up with two very different yet still-competing temperature scales is a fascinating one for starting classes on several topics.

Speaking of birthdays, we don't really know the birthday of a famous mathematician whom we celebrate in November: Fibonacci, also known as Leonardo the son of Bonacci and Leonardo of Pisa (the Italian versions of which always sound cooler, in my opinion). Fibonacci Day is celebrated on 11/23 every year, not because of a date of birth, but instead because they're the first non-zero numbers in the Fibonacci Sequence. This sequence, graphed, produces the Fibonacci Spiral, which in turn is a very close approximation of the Golden Spiral, both of which appear in many ways in the natural world around us.

What many mathematicians brush off about Fibonacci, though, is that Liber Abaci, the work that shot him to fame, is actually one of the first texts on business mathematics. It is credited by some with bringing Europe out of the Dark Ages by opening up commerce -- for the first time it became clear to the Italian merchants how to use Hindu-Arabic numerals to multiply, say, 2 coins times 275 barrels to come up with a tax or a storage fee without pulling out the abacus to multiply II times CCLXXV.

(if you want to have some fun some day, let the kids try that or a similar operation using the two numeral systems)

Hope you're having a great start to a great month!

-Stephen