Ivars Peterson

All Stories by Ivars Peterson

  1. Math

    Extra Time, Math, and the SAT

    Extra time on the math portion of the SAT helps the most able students the most.

  2. Math

    Counting on Fibonacci

    Fibonacci numbers and their relationships can be visualized in terms of tilings.

  3. Math

    Progressive Primes

    Prime numbers have all sorts of remarkable and mysterious properties. Evenly divisible only by themselves and 1, primes can’t be written as the product of smaller positive integers. There are infinitely many of them, and they appear to be scattered somewhat haphazardly among the whole numbers. It’s not yet known if there are infinitely many […]

  4. Math

    Anatomy of a Bead Creature

    Beadwork offers a novel view of hyperbolic geometry.

  5. Math

    From Number Puzzles to Automata

    A high school student plays with numbers and does an award-winning project elucidating the link between automata and divisibility.

  6. Math

    Riding on Square Wheels

    A square wheel can roll smoothly if it travels over a roadway of the right geometric shape.

  7. Math

    Pinpointing Killer Asteroids

    Two award-winning high school students' projects focused on new methods for pinpointing asteroids locations.

  8. Math

    Deriving the Structure of Numbers

    A novel mathematical function called the number derivative offers new insights into the structure of integers.

  9. Math

    Mapping Scientific Frontiers

    Can computer visualization help identify turning points and milestones in scientific discovery?

  10. Math

    Mining the Tagged Web

    IBM's WebFountain project gathers and annotates Web content on a vast scale to serve as a platform for data miners.

  11. Math

    Heads or Tails?

    Research interest in the fairness of coin tosses goes back many years.

  12. Math

    Sculpting with a Twist

    There’s more than one way to slice a bagel. A bagel (or a doughnut) can serve as a physical model for a mathematical surface called a torus. You can slice it horizontally (or longitudinally) so that you end up with two halves, each containing a hole. That’s great for making sandwiches because the cut exposes […]