Day 3: Mathematics Ativity

Activity Day 3

Mathematical modelling and solving of quizzes      

Group:-3

Members:-, Amruth gowda, Rohit Raj ,Nikhil, Yogishwar, Trishal, Supriya

 We were introduced to Janavi mam by Kamala Maam. The day was more of a head scratching sessions which involved puzzle solving and also creation of models.

Her class began half an hour later. We decided that instead of having four puzzles (soma’s cube,  loop the loop, creation of dodecahedron  using 12 regular pentagons, and the tower of annoys) we decided to have three of them(soma’s cube, loop the loop, creation of dodecahedron  using 12 regular pentagons.   

At first we began solving soma’s cube. The Soma cube is a solid dissection puzzle invented by Piet Hein in 1936 during a lecture on quantum mechanics conducted by Werner Heisenberg. Mam allowed only ten teams to try out the puzzle and asked the rest if the team to try it later on due to the shortage of time. Even in those teams only 3 or 4 teams were able to complete it within the given time limit of 5 minutes all the teams who were able to solve the puzzle did it within 3 minutes. Then we moved on to the formation of a dodecahedron using 12 regular pentagons. This project was supposed to be an individual project but as many boys had not bought their personal share of 12 A4 size sheets mam made this a group activity. At first mam made us fold the rectangular A4 sized sheet into a regular pentagon by using the technique of origami and not kirigami. After the formation of the 12 regular pentagons mam made us to fix it together to for a dodecagon. This process was a nice one but a little tricky due to the condition she had laid that the flaps that were created during the formation of the regular pentagon must be inserted into the pentagon. A very few teams were able to create a dodecagon. Later mam started to trick our mind by the puzzle of loop the loop. It was simple newspaper quiz which contained a grid and many numbers in the grid with the condition that the number should be surrounded by the same number of line segments and by the end we should create only one closed figure. This puzzle was taught to us as many students were not aware of solving it even though they had seen the puzzle in many newspapers. Later mam told us to create our own loop the loop question. Many of the students did it the hard way (putting the number and then drawing the grid) were as many students did it the smart way (first drawing the grid and then writing the corresponding numbers).

 Later by the time it was 12 o’clock Mr.Sundar  ,a person doing his PhD in the Indian Institute Of Astrophysics,  gave us a small session on black holes. At the beginning he made us visualise the sky in all the past times (the time when Newton was present, the time when Galileo Galilee was present, and the times when we were nomads). Then he told us about the formation of a black hole and why it looked so. There we also discussed a little on the merging of the galaxies and with it the merging of a black hole.Later a question and answer session was done where we were allowed to ask some questions. Many interesting questions came like:-

·        Why can’t a person go as fast as light

·        What happens when an isolated black hole doesn’t get any matter

·        What is the difference between a black hole and a worm hole?