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Old 08-05-2006, 03:24 AM
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Zeke Zeke is offline
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I can top all of this. During the second math camp, I brought up the topic of pentominoes. One question we looked at was whether a given pentomino is capable of tiling the plane -- i.e. forming an infinite, regular tesselation. Some cases are easy to check, such as the pentomino which is just five squares in a row. The more complicated pentominoes take some thought. In particular, I suggested that they try the S pentomino:



(This is also called the N pentomino; I prefer S.) But you have to be careful, I warned them. After all, it's sort of a snake. And there are few things more dangerous than SNAKES ON A PLANE.

And they didn't get it!

Yeesh. What are we teaching kids these days?
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