First and foremost, I would just like to extend my condolences to Professor Gottlieb and her family. I am truly sorry for your loss…
Professor Kim began today’s class with a puzzle that related to the years of Mary Somerville’s birth and death. It looked something like this: _ _ _ _ -_ _ _ _ . We were then told that the first 2 digits of her birth year were also the 7th prime number, which we discovered was 17. The last two digits of her birth year are equal the sum of the first two numbers, 10(7+1) = 80… 1780.For the year of death, Professor Kim explained that the last 2 digits were the reverse of the birth year, so 1 8 7. The last two digits of her year of death are the sum of the first two digits multiplied by the second digit, or, (1+8)X8=72. Which, in fact, was correct. Mary Somverille was born in 1780 and passed in 1872.
Then we discussed the Chladni Diagrams, which dealt with vibrations of sand patterns; a topic which interested Ms. Sophie Germain as well.
The idea was to spread the sand over glass plates and then run a violin bow over the edges to observe the patterns created through the vibration.
We also briefly discussed, ::Gasp:: Trigonometry AFTER Professor Kim gave us a colorful acronym to soften the blow. She wrote this sentence on the board “Some Old Hag Caught A Hippie Tripping On Acid.”
Sin(ø)= O/H or some old hag
Cos(ø)=A/H caught a hippie
Tan(ø)=O/H tripping on acid
This had something to do with a popularized scientific discovery; taking different consecutive terms until a constant difference (I think ??)
Our class ended with the introduction of the Fibonacci Rabbit Sequence. Professor Kim told us that a single pair of rabbits one male and the other female are born at the beginning of a year… the rabbit are not fertile until the first month of life, but they do not give birth until the second month, I think(?) Anyway, the first two rabbit will give birth to a male/female pair at the end of each month and so on and so on. Given the conditions that no rabbits die. – How many pairs of rabbits will have been born by the end of one year?
Apparently there are different number sequences involved as you can see in the video and also on the website, which gave the example of the sequence 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 etc. I still don’t understand the problem, but the website above made a little more sence.
