Dr. Dawn's blog

The FoxTrot Strip from November 6, 2005 contained a “numerical word search”

You can find the strip here.

There are seven clues which are arithmetic problems, but there is also the derivative of 43981 x , the definite integral of x^3 from 0 to 16, and the sum from k equals 0 to 47 of k squared.    I asked my calculus students to perform all these calculations.

In this FoxTrot strip Paige has been cramming for her math final and thus is answering all questions in mathematical notation.

http://assets.amuniversal.com/b07d90305e30012ee3bf00163e41dd5b

(Its the May 22, 2005 strip, if the link doesn’t work.)

In precalculus I asked the students:

1) What temperature will it be tomorrow?  Is it going to be hot tomorrow?

(The answer is sin^{-1}(1) =90 degrees, so it will be hot).

2) What does the girl (Paige) want for snack?

(The answer is 3.14159265359…, so she wants pie).

In calculus of sequences and series, you could also ask what the discount was in the fourth panel, which requires computing the sum of an infinite geometric series.

In an algebra class one could ask what time Paige went to bed (\sqrt{121}= 11:00) or What is on TV? (4!=24).