Hello, again! I have recently discovered a man, named Scott Flansburg, who holds a Guinness World Record for being able to calculate faster than a calculator in adding the same number over and over again as many times as he can in 15 seconds. He beat the calculator by adding 38 thirty-six times in a row.
He has these very cool ways of teaching how to add, divide, and multiply numbers. He claims that around the world we teach math in a manner that requires so much memorization that math doesn't useful or user friendly. He claims that every day of your life you will have to use numbers at some point, no matter what you are doing. He also claims that his ways of teaching simple maths skills will make people feel more comfortable dealing with numbers, and make numbers easier to understand and deal with. He says that numbers are confusing because use them in the completely incorrect way. We add in the opposite direction as we read and we have to memorize everything. We make maths harder than they really are and he has found the easier routes to understanding numbers.
Here are a few videos that talk about what he does!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nTpLpOZXnUI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vGULqoEP5TE

Sources
http://scottflansburg.com/
www.youtube.com
www.google.com

I just got to read the article on Tom Zhang and his adventures with the Twin prime conjecture. I found the article a little bit tough to get through, but it was interesting once you got through it. I found it refreshing to read what he was saying, for he seemed to be a very humble person. This it me as a very cool thing, because I expected a very shy mathematical wizard who wouldn't enjoy sharing his thoughts. Though he was a bit shy at points in the interview, giving short almost unexplained answers, he didn't seems tense. Now, one of the questions made him tell us that as time has gone on after he solved the conjecture, he has grown accustomed to public speaking. It told us that he was the way i thought he would be. I admire this quality mainly because I don't feel to strongly about speaking in public. I also am glad to know that he was, and still is, very humble. After he was asked if he shared his work with his colleagues, he told us that he didn't share it with them. He said he might have mentioned it a few times, but didn't say anything about the problem. I feel that he is the kind of person that takes his time to make sure he is right before answering, which requires patience. Without patience, math would be way harder than it needs to be. I think he is a great advocate for patience and thoroughness. We could learn from him that there are many ways to deal with problems and that if we just work at our issues, we can find a way to solve them. I mean, honestly, he worked on a single math problem for FOUR YEARS. If that doesn't require patience and thoroughness, I don't know what does.
Now to answer the second half of the prompt. I have always loved geometry. I don't know why but I like shapes and lengths. I guess that it could relates to sports. in swimming or golf, there are all sorts of shapes that are involved. Golf- concentric circles: your hands create part of the inner circle, while your club head creates a portion of the outer circle. Both circles are on a center point, your spine. In swimming, you can look at the water as a horizontal line and when swimming at the ideal positions, you are either parallel with the line or at a slight angle with your head above the water and your legs below. I guess Geometry just relates to my life pretty well, making me like it more than other subjects, as long as I don's have to prove triangles similar ever again. :)

There are many different places that i could use math secretly but, rarely do I. On the days that the lawn needs to be mown, I use area equations and estimations on the size of my yard as a way to find out the most efficient route through my yard. Is this secret math? Another example of secret math could be how I think about golf.   When standing on the tee box, I sometimes can be overwhelmed by how small the fairway looks way out there at about 270 yards away. A 40 yard gap may look like its really only about 5 yards. I begin to calculate the percent of fairway to rough at that point where my ball will go and the idea of hitting the ball to that tiny spot way out there seems like a more manageable feat after the math has been done. Math on the golf course comes in handy in two ways. The first is to help you understand what shots to hit, and the second is to help you take your mind someplace else so you can stay calm. You keep your mind occupied and at ease for the time being if you do some math about the shot you will hit next. If you understand the mathematics, then you can understand the shot.When trying to think about the shot, you need to think about what angle the ball must take at a certain speed to reach where you want it to reach, factor in the wind and elevation, and you are no longer worried about hitting the shot, but worried about how to figure out what to do with the shot. After the math, the shot is a piece of cake because I have taken my mind away from worrying about golf and made golf (in my mind) way easier than it really is because math says it easy in my head! For me, contemplating all of these things at each shot, helps me relax and stay focused.

Hello! I enjoy have enjoyed learning about functions and such lately because I am an avid golfer. Knowing how far the ball needs to go to carry onto the green is key to putting up a good score. Most often, the green is not on the same plane that you are on. you have to know how much higher or lower the green is than where your ball is. An example of what I'm trying to convey to everyone can be found on the 2nd hole at Tanoan Country Club. With a good tee shot, you play to a green that is elevated at least 15 yards above where you and your ball lie. If you looked at the hole from a good spot, you could turn this shot into a triangle, and decide how far the ball would need to fly to get to the hole (telling you to give yourself more yardage rather than less). If my ball sat next to the 120 yard marker on this hole, know that if the course was flat, I would hit what I call a "baby pitching wedge." But, guessing that the hole is really about 15 yards above where my ball is, I probably need to fly the ball over where the "flat shot" stopped. So, I would probably hit a "full pitching wedge." I also know that from my ball to the hole is a 7.13 degree incline or about a 12% grade. The idea is that if there is more grade percent, then you travel a longer distance to travel than if you journey was flat.

Hello! After reading the Jamm'n peaches blog, I agree that our society has become much less mathematically savvy as the days have increased. I agree that it is very silly to see a set of three quarters in a basketball game and find it useless to count street addresses by what seem to be completely random values. I believe there is a main cause to all of this.
As I understand it, most people now have a smartphone, laptop, ipad, or computer at their disposal nearly every minute of the day. As time has continued on, a need for understanding simple mathematics has quickly decreased. Our brains seem to turn to goo and we decide that it is much easier to use a calculator to do all of our work for us instead of exercising our brains. Also, I feel like most people just go along with what others tell them. There is no need to give any effort to thinking about what they might actually be saying, such as thinking about 3 quarters for a full game. So, most people just go with everything due to their laziness.this just seems to be the logical reason as to why our mathematical incorporation into everyday life has steadily decreased.
Due to our laziness, there seems to be no end to our increasing loss of intelligence .

Hello!! First I'd like to say that Math is a cool class as it is and this Blog idea makes it even better.

To answer to Ms. M's questions, I believe the Peaches story relates to math in a few different ways. At first Math can seem useless and boring like a bunch of dead rose bushes. But once you wait for it to bloom into something beautiful and awesome it can be very fun exciting to learn all about how it all works. You can learn how to do all kinds of math, similar to how you can cut roses to make them continue to bloom and bloom and become more interesting and get even better as you continue to work with the subject. I like to think the roses are something similar to the the peaches in the story, also. The peaches and roses seem useless at the beginning but once you learn how cool and exciting they can become if you do certain things with them,  they become fun and exciting, after you work with them for a while.

I like to approach math as a way to learn about how different things work together. All of the things that you learn all end up culminating into something wonderful as a final product. You have to work at the things that you might not understand until you get a firm understanding of that which you are trying to do. Once the concept(s) is/are understood, you can use your newly found tool(s) to your advantage in a new situation. Math is an excellent way to understand how to put things together so that you can weave new ideas into old and new problems. Math can help everywhere in your life even if it seems like math might not relate to the situation at hand.

-Whit Vinson