Category Mathematics

Do board games improve math skills?

We’ve intuitively known that most board games have a positive effect on us. Be it mental well-being, some form of learning, or even strategizing, board games contribute immensely. Given that they also help us stay away from our devices during the duration when we are playing the game, they are bound to become more popular in the future.

A new study has now validated part of what we’ve known intuitively, stating that board games based on numbers enhance mathematical ability among children. Their results, which is based on a comprehensive review of research published on this topic over the last 23 years, are published in the peer-reviewed journal Early Years in July.

19 studies from 2000

In order to investigate the effects of physical board games in promoting leaning, the researchers reviewed 19 studies published from 2000 onwards. These studies involved children under the age of 10 and all except one focused on the relationship between the board games and the mathematical skills of the players.

Children participating in these studies received special board game sessions led by teachers, therapists, or parents. While some of these board games were numbers-based like Snakes and Ladders and Monopoly, others did not focus on numeracy skills. These sessions were on average held twice a week for 20 minutes over two-and-a-half months.

Based on assessments on their mathematics performance before and after the intervention sessions, the studies came to their conclusions. Right from basic numeric competency like naming numbers and understanding their relationship with each other, to more complex tasks including addition and subtraction, mathematical ability received a boost in more than half the cases.

Beneficial for all learners?

 While the review established the positive effect of numbers-based board games for children, especially those young, it would be interesting to find out if such an approach would also be beneficial for all learners, including first-generation learners. By improving their fundamental understanding of numbers. children stand to gain as it helps ward off their fear of mathematics and numbers.

The study, meanwhile, also highlighted the lack of scientific evaluation to determine the impact of board games on the language and literacy areas of children. This research group plans to investigate this in their next project.

There is a need to design board games for educational purposes, both in terms of quantity and quality. The researchers believe that this is an interesting space that would open up in the coming years.

Picture Credit : Google 

Mathematical concepts you can pick up from football

The whole world was in a frenzy duiring the FIFA World cup that took place in Qatar in November-December 2022. All of us were glued to our television screens and rooting for our favourite teams. But did you know that while watching football, you can also spot many elements of maths?

In this article, we will tell you how football and maths have an interesting correlation between them and how many great footballers apply mathematical concepts of geometry, speed-distance-time, and calculus on the field to score goals for their team.

Tiki-taka strategy

This is a systematic approach to football which relies on team unity and a comprehensive understanding in the geometry of space on a football field. Many times, to increase their ball possession, football players try to form triangles all over the field which makes it difficult for the opposing team to win the ball. This strategy is called tiki-taka. This approach was used by Spain in 2010 and was instrumental in their World Cup win. The next time you are on the playground, you can try incorporating tiki-taka to win the game against your opponent.

Measurements and units

Maths is also essential when it comes to the shape and dimension of the pitch. Thus, measurements and units are also used in football. The preferred size for many professional teams’ stadiums is 105 by 68 metres (115 yd x 74 yd) with an area of 7,140 square metres (76,900 sq ft). Notice the various units being used here? Amazing, isn’t it?

Strategising based on data

Your favourite team probably has a set of mathematicians or statisticians who work along with the coaches and players to come up with successful strategies based on the data they collect after observing matches that the team plays. An example here would be if two players pass the ball 300 times to each other on average, what kind of advantage can the opposition gain by reducing their total number of passes to 100?

Voronoi diagrams

Voronoi diagrams are friends of every coach. These diagrams help them find the shortest distance to reach a landmark. They help coaches analyse and understand the defence that the team leaves open, helps them find new angles from which they can attack, and helps them gauge how well the players use space.

Let us now make a Voronoi diagram. Take two points A and B, their perpendicular bisector contains all the points that are equidistant from them. You will see the points in one region are closer to A and the other to B. You now have your Voronoi diagram. Add another point Cand follow the same process to get another Voronoi diagram.

Penalty patterns

Goalkeepers also use maths when they want to save penalties. Several players follow a pattern while shooting their penalty shots. Goalkeepers always perform an analysis of the previous shot of the players which puts them in a better situation to predict the next shot and be prepared to stop the opposing team from scoring a goal.

Picture Credit : Google 

Why is Dr. Jagadish Shukla famous?

Dr. Jagadish Shukla was born in a small village, Mirdha, in Uttar Pradesh. The village had no electricity, not even proper roads. The primary school did not have a building, and Jagadish Shukla had his early classes under a large banyan tree! He could not study science in high school because the schools did not include it.

He went to Banaras Hindu University (BHU) and graduated in Physics, Mathematics and Geology. He did MS in Geophysics and then finished his PhD too. Later he got a ScD (Doctor of Science) in Meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

He chose a career in the atmospheric sciences and became a professor at George Mason University in the U.S.

Dr. Shukla’s study areas include the Asian monsoon dynamics, deforestation and desertification. Do you know what is desertification? It is when the soil loses its quality due to weather or human activity.

Dr. Shukla helped establish weather and climate research centres in India. He also established research institutions in Brazil and the U.S. He has been with the World Climate Research Programme since its start and founded the Centre for Ocean- Land-Atmosphere Studies, Virginia, U.S.

He has also established the Gandhi College in his village for educating rural students, especially women, and was awarded Padma Shri in 2012.

Picture Credit : Google 

What are the achievements of Ritabrata Munshi?

Ritabrata Munshi is a mathematician specialising in number theory. He is affiliated to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, and the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.

Number theory is a branch of mathematics that studies properties of positive integers or whole numbers that do not have a fraction or decimal part. Munshi made significant contribution to the number theory, in that he linked arithmetic geometry, representation theory and complex analysis in many ways. For this, he was awarded the Ramanujan Prize which is given for mathematicians under the age of 45 from a developing country.

Ritabrata Munshi did his doctoral studies at Princeton University in the U.S with Sir Andrew Wiles, a famous mathematician. After a few post-doctoral years in the U.S, he joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India.

He has received many awards for his work, including the Infosys Science Foundation’s 2017 award in mathematical sciences, the Birla Science Prize (2013) and the ISI Alumni gold medal. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 2015. He was also awarded the ICTP Ramanujan Prize in 2018.

Munshi was elected a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2016. Munshi was awarded the Swarna-Jayanti fellowship by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. He was also elected a fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2016.

In 2018 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). He was elected a fellow of the Indian National Science Academy in 2020.

He is on the editorial board of the Journal of the Ramanujan Mathematical Society and the Hardy-Ramanujan Journal.

Picture Credit : Google 

What are the achievements of Anish Ghosh?

Anish Ghosh is a professor in the School of Mathematics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai. He specialises in ergodic theory, Lie groups and number theory and has greatly contributed in these areas of mathematics.

He is a part of the INFOSYS-Chandrasekharan Virtual Centre for Random Geometry which is a group of scientists at TIFR, Mumbai and ICTS, Bengaluru working together.

Ghosh finished his BSc degree from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai and received his PhD degree from the Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts in 2006. His research supervisor was Dmitry Yanovich Kleinbock, renowned mathematician from Brandeis University. He did post-doctoral studies at the University of Texas at Austin. After that he started his teaching career as Lecturer in the University of East Anglia, U.K. He then moved on to the Tata Institute.

Anish Ghosh bagged the 2021 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Mathematical Sciences, India’s highest science award within the country. He was also awarded the NASI-Scopus Young Scientist Award in 2017, DST Swarnajayanti Fellowship in 2017, Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2018 and B M Birla Science Prize in 2017.

Picture Credit : google 

Who developed Karmarkar’s algorithm?

Narendra Krishna Karmarkar a famous Indian mathematician is the one behind Karmarkar’s algorithm. An algorithm is a step-by- step solution to a problem. You can call it a recipe book for mathematics.

Karmarkar’s algorithm helped to solve problems in linear programming in a novel way. He found this method and published the results while working for Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.

Karmarkar did his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay and M.S. from the California Institute of Technology. He then took Ph.D. in computer science the University of California, Berkeley.

After that, Karmarkar joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. He continues to work on new architecture for supercomputing. The digital library, IEEE Xplore, has published some of his works.

He received the prestigious Paris Kanellakis Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 2000. The Prime Minister of India also presented him the Srinivasa Ramanujan Birth Centenary Award for 1999.

Picture credit: Google