Kate poses a great problem.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Dan asks a great question.
To which I responded something like, "yeah, prolly, but it'd take a bunch of brute force."
Saturday, November 19, 2011
I forward it to the GeoGebra Forum.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Raymond responds.
This flow of information absolutely amazes me. I mean, I loved the question after Kate posted it. In fact, I immediately created an applet and had used the problem with my advanced class early in the first quarter. They struggled a bit with it, but then when Dan asked about highlighting the squares and doing some of the counting, things changed.
I consider myself to be a little better than average when using GeoGebra, but Raymond is a freaking Jedi. Take a look at his stuff. He takes an applet that I thought would require a number of tedious steps and bangs it out using 6 steps--and within 24 hours. That's ridiculous.
The applet is here.
2 comments:
Huh -- I don't know if anyone has pointed this out already, but it appears that (number of boxes) / (length of diagonal) is always between 1/sqrt(2) and sqrt(2). The lower limit is easy to understand, but the upper limit is intriguing (if it's correct).
And I can sit in bed on a Sunday morning and take it all in on my iPad, even playing with the applet. Brilliant!
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