Archive for April 2011
What math teachers should know about memory, 2: working memory
Posted by: Gary Ernest Davis on: April 21, 2011
Mathematics teachers commonly complain that their students do not memorize facts, definitions and formulas. In a previous post I described Hermann Ebbinghaus’s experiments on rote memorization, and his finding that memorization of nonsense syllables decays exponentially. What we teachers of mathematics want is for students to recall, at least for the very next class, what […]
The curious case of the number 3435
Posted by: Gary Ernest Davis on: April 17, 2011
The (base 10) number has the curious property that It shares this property with since . What makes even more curious is that it is the only number other than that has this property. To prove this we need to talk a little more exactly about what is this property. The Münchausen property Suppose is […]
