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Math at the Movies

Math at the Movies. Dr. Don Allen Department of Mathematics Texas A&M. Topics. Counting. You're not in Kansas anymore, Todo. The ball game Calculations. The Die Hard 3 problem Calculus, anyone? Higher mathematics Hiding in the train. Counting. Finger counting.

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Math at the Movies

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  1. Math at the Movies Dr. Don Allen Department of Mathematics Texas A&M

  2. Topics Counting. You're not in Kansas anymore, Todo. The ball game Calculations The Die Hard 3 problem Calculus, anyone? Higher mathematics Hiding in the train

  3. Counting

  4. Finger counting In the movie The Clan of the Cave Bear, Ayla is adopted into a clan of Neanderthals. Her adoptive father is teaching her to count.

  5. Give me a high-five… He can count to five. "Only Mog-ur knows this much." She then shows him how to count to ten and then to twenty. Ayla is at the head of this class!

  6. Chinese counting

  7. Oceana – base 5

  8. Ancient carvings 6,500

  9. Blombos Cave 70,000 years Purpose???

  10. American Indians Apache Navaho Sioux

  11. Double tally stick Banking

  12. Quipu

  13. Comedy and Counting 7 × 13 = 28 ???

  14. Abbott & Costello

  15. Abbott & Costello 13 13 13 13 13 13 13 28

  16. Topics Counting. You're not in Kansas anymore, Todo. The ball game Calculations The Die Hard 3 problem Calculus, anyone? Higher mathematics Hiding in the train

  17. The Wizard of Oz

  18. Scarecrow – with brain "The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side." What???

  19. Pythagorean Theorem "The sum of the squares upon the legs of a right triangle is equal to the square upon the hypotenuse".

  20. Pythagorean Theorem …from an Arabic translation of Euclid Proposition I-47

  21. Topics Counting. You're not in Kansas anymore, Todo. The ball game Calculations The Die Hard 3 problem Calculus, anyone? Higher mathematics Hiding in the train

  22. Baseball and math??? Bill can paint the house in five hours, and Mary can paint the house in three hours. How many hours did it take both to paint the house? Homework problem

  23. Here is what we see

  24. Painting the house

  25. Filling the tank Of the four spouts, one fills the whole tank in one day, one in two days, one in three days, and one in four days. What time will it take all four to fill the tank? From a Greek Anthology, c. 500 CE Not such a new problem…

  26. Topics Counting. You're not in Kansas anymore, Todo. The ball game Computations The Die Hard 3 problem Calculus, anyone Higher mathematics Hiding in the train

  27. Computation, anyone? What’s the search area? Math modeling

  28. Did he get it correct? Our Hero An error of about .04%. Wow!! Exact math

  29. Tom and pal Wilson

  30. The Fugitive "Our fugitive has now been on the run for 90 minutes. Foot speed over uneven ground is four miles per hour. That gives us a radius of six miles."

  31. It’s a rates problem, plus…

  32. Gold and more gold Is he right? …and a quotation of the price of gold on the Paris commodity exchange, and the fact that there are 14,000 bars of gold, he computes the value to be $16,000,000.

  33. Assemble the facts

  34. For just one bar and… To get the value of all the gold we multiply by the number of bars He’s way off!

  35. In 12 Angry Men a young man is accused of murdering his father. All jurors but one want to convict him immediately.

  36. The hypothesis During the course of the deliberations, the jurors discuss how long a six car elevated subway would take to pass the window of the victim. "It takes about 10 seconds," he said. Other jurors agreed. Does this value hold up?

  37. Assemble the facts - compute • Let us suppose that • Each subway car is 48 feet long • The subway travels at 30 mi/hr • So, the subway is 6 × 48= 288 feet long.

  38. Now compute We have Thus the subway moves 180 feet in They’re way off!

  39. Topics Counting. You're not in Kansas anymore, Todo. The ball game Calculations The Die Hard 3 problem Calculus, anyone? Higher mathematics Hiding in the train

  40. The Die Hard 3 problem The bad guy tells our heros that they must make exactly four gallons from five and three gallon jugs. They did it just in time.

  41. How did they do it?

  42. Step-by-step

  43. Step-by-step

  44. Step-by-step

  45. Given 11 and 4. Make 8 Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4

  46. Topics Counting. You're not in Kansas anymore, Todo. the ball game Calculations The Die Hard 3 problem Calculus, anyone? Higher mathematics Hiding in the train

  47. Calculus, anyone? Richard challenges the Chinese shopkeeper to a dual. Who can compute faster?

  48. The abacist The shopkeeper wins at addition, easily. They tie at multiplication. But when taking a cube root, Richard wins. But … Was he correct?

  49. He was correct – applying calculus Binomial theorem Approximation

  50. The calculation Richard gives 12.00238

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