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Author Insight
Recreational Math
Playing around with numbers is something that students should do more often in school. Just as art teachers might have students freedraw or language arts teachers might use freewriting, math teachers can have students play around with numbers. This can be done as a warm-up activity at nearly any time.
Book Excerpt
Beyond Infinity
One of my favorite pastimes is playing around with numbers. It’s kind of like doodling, but instead of drawing, I manipulate numbers. For example, I might try using basic mathematical operations to work with a single digit in order to generate all of the numbers from 1 to 100. I’ll give you some examples using the number four:
4 ÷ 4 = 1
(4 + 4) ÷ 4 = 2
4 − (4 ÷ 4) = 3
For larger numbers use something called factorial, which in the case of four is written like this: “4!” Factorial means take a positive number and multiply it by all of the other numbers counting down to one. So 4! means 4 × 3 × 2 × 1, which equals 24. Another example is 6!, or 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1, which equals 720.The results get really big very fast. Eight factorial jumps to 40,320 and 15! is an incredible 1,307,674,368,000.
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