By David Shaw, 30 October 2019
Difficulty: Fun Sergio is an electrician repairing a power line. There’s a stretch of eight, evenly spaced power poles he’s working on. The distance from the first to the fourth is 120 metres. What’s the distance from the first to the eighth pole?
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By David Shaw, 16 October 2019
Difficulty: Tricky I’ve got a square piece of paper, with lines for writing on both sides. Right now, the lines are running up and down the page. To get the lines running left and right, I could rotate the page, but that’s too boring. Can I do it by flipping the page instead? Scroll […]
By David Shaw, 30 May 2019
This shape has a little secret. It’s known as a chamfered cube, and it’s not as perfect as it first seems…
By David Shaw, 17 October 2018
Tom’s just finished sewing a quilt! It’s made of lots of equal-sized squares of fabric sewn together. Currently, it’s 12 squares long and six squares wide. Tom tried putting the quilt on his bed, but it’s the wrong shape.
By David Shaw, 23 August 2018
Time to celebrate! For only the second time ever, an Australian has won the most famous prize in mathematics – the Fields Medal. Let’s take a moment to celebrate the achievements of the winner, Akshay Venkatesh.
By David Shaw, 12 April 2018
It’s that time of year again! The winner of the Abel prize, mathematics’ answer to the Nobel, has been announced. This year’s winner is Robert Langlands, a mathematician more famous for asking questions than answering them.
By David Shaw, 16 February 2018
Blood left at a crime scene can tell you a lot about the events. To rewind the clock and look back in time, you just need a ruler and some trigonometry.
By David Shaw, 23 January 2018
What kinds of shapes pack a flat surface with no gaps? Squares are great for floor tiles, and bees stick hexagons together. With a bit of work, you can get any triangle, no matter how stretched, to fit together without gaps. But what about pentagons? These five-sided shapes are awkward, but some types fit together.
By David Shaw, 27 September 2017
Have you ever made a paper snowflake? Here’s a different twist on a classic craft activity.
By David Shaw, 27 June 2017
Time to create a map! Making a map of the entire Earth is tricky, because paper is flat, and planets are curved. There are lots of different ways to ‘flatten’ Earth, and each way produces a different shaped map. This method is super spiky as it involves triangles.
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Perfect for ages 8 – 14
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