Mathigon

The 2025 Polypad Art and Music Contest has launched! We invite students from around the world to submit their best creations by June 13, 2025. Additionally, for the first time ever, we’re inviting educators to join the fun! Learn more at polypad.amplify.com/contest

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Blaise Pascal was a mathematician, physicist, and philosopher and was born 402 years ago today. He invented one of the first mechanical calculators, worked on geometry, probability, physics, and theology. Learn more at mathigon.org/timeline/pascal

Grigori Perelman was born 59 years ago today. Perelman proved the Poincaré Conjecture which was one of the most famous unsolved problems in math. The conjecture is still the only one of the 7 Millennium Prize problems to have been solved. Learn more here: mathigon.org/timeline/perel…

John Forbes Nash was born 97 years ago #onthisday. He showed how mathematics can explain the decision-making in complex, real-life situations like economics or the military, and is the only person to receive both the Nobel Prize and the Abel Prize. Learn more here:…

The Hailstone sequence 🌨️ follows a simple pattern but behaves as unpredictably as hailstones in a cloud. Every starting number seems to reach one eventually, but no one knows if this is always true! Learn more about this sequence at math.fit/hailstone

Deck 6 of Addition and Subtraction by Heart 2, uses number bars to provide the most abstract representation of subtraction within 20. Try for yourself and learn more about the free fluency practice resource at fluency.amplify.com

Al-Khwarizmi’s book Al-kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb “al-ğabr” wa’l-muqābala established “Algebra” as a new area of mathematics. It showed how to solve linear and quadratic equations, how to calculate the area and volume of geometric shapes, and introduced the concept of…

This is the final week of the 2025 Polypad Art and Music Contest! Looking for a great end-of-year activity? This is the perfect thing. Learn more at polypad.amplify.com/contest

To celebrate world ocean day on June 8, consider measuring the length of the coastline of a country. Do you know that it is infinitely long, a fractal, and has a non-integer dimension like 1.21? Mandelbrot realized that this dimension is a measure of its “roughness”. Learn more…

In case you missed the announcement, the 2025 Polypad Art and Music Contest is on-going! Looking for a great end-of-year activity? This is the perfect thing. Learn more at polypad.amplify.com/contest

Deck 5 of Addition and Subtraction by Heart 2 focuses on subtraction facts within 20 in which decomposing could be used to solve the problem, such as 14 – 6. Learn more and get started with this free resource at fluency.amplify.com

Start with 100 dice. Roll them and remove all the sixes. Repeat until there are 25 or less dice left. How many rounds will this take? Learn more about exploring this idea with students in this Polypad Pointer video: youtu.be/cJbLOWkx9KI

Mathematics has applications across so many parts of everyday life - from weather prediction to bridge design, crowd control to music shuffling, and fraud detection, to name a few. Explore many more interesting examples at mathigon.org/applications

In case you missed the announcement, the 2025 Polypad Art and Music Contest is on-going! Looking for a great end-of-year activity? This is the perfect thing. Learn more at polypad.amplify.com/contest

72 years ago today, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the top of Mount Everest. More than a century earlier, mathematicians used trigonometry to calculate its precise height. Learn more at math.fit/mountains

Want to learn about making a piece of visual art of the 2025 Polypad Art and Music Contest? Get started here: teacher.desmos.com/activitybuilde…

Abraham de Moivre was born 358 years ago today. He discovered a formula linking complex numbers and trigonometry, first conjectured the central limit theorem, and found a non-recursive formula for Fibonacci numbers using the golden ratio. Learn more here: mathigon.org/timeline/de-mo…

Bertrand Russell was born 153 years ago today. The British philosopher, mathematician and author tried to create a formal, logical foundation for all of math. He was also a passionate pacifist, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Learn more here: mathigon.org/timeline/russe…

Maria Gaetana Agnesi was born 225 years ago today. She was an Italian mathematician and was the first western woman to write a mathematics textbook and the first woman to be appointed professor at a university. Learn more here: mathigon.org/timeline/agnesi

Deck 4 of Addition and Subtraction by Heart uses numbers cards and focuses on subtraction problems within 20 in which decomposing is not necessary. At times, students can click on a card greater than 10 to split it into two parts. Learn more at fluency.amplify.com