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Jungle Ice

Welcome to the July edition of NRICH, the maths enrichment site.
This site supports teachers and learners of mathematics with thousands of free resources which are designed to develop subject knowledge and problem-solving skills.

This month the problem solving and mathematical thinking theme is Making and Testing Hypotheses.

Shapes in the Alphabet and Logic Block Collections look at classification: testing what belongs with what and what doesn't.

For the brave, Locate the Lion involves deciding when there's enough information to feel confident about our judgements.

There's certainly no shortage of engaging interactivity : The Gr8 Coach will challenge you to refine the team's training programme based on thoughtful experimenting. In the Bag will take you right to the heart of hypothesising and the Reaction Timer let's you frame and pursue your own questions about human reaction.

Finally the historical, or pre-historical, Ishango Bone and Babylon Numbers point up the difference between Hypothesis testing, the intelligent consideration of likelihood, and a Conjecture, the activity that precedes proof.

Go to Stage 1 & 2 if you are interested in mathematics at a level usually encountered at primary school.
Go to Stage 2 & 3 if you are interested in mathematics at a level usually encountered at lower secondary school.
Go to Stage 3 & 4 if you are interested in mathematics at a level usually encountered at upper secondary school.
Go to Stage 4 & 5 if you are interested in mathematics usually encountered at post-16 level.

Alternatively, click on the links in the left-hand menu.

Ask NRICH offers a discussion forum that supports an online mathematics community.

If you've enjoyed tackling some of this month's problems you may well be interested in handling uncertainty in an objective way. Are you more likely to win the lottery than be killed by a falling tortoise ? How good are league tables at helping you make decisions? What does the Premier League tell us about the quality of the teams competing? Why do coincidences happen so often? Visit the new website, Understanding Uncertainty, set up to support the Winton programme for the public understanding of risk based in the Statistical Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. Oh, and before you ask, it's logo is a portrait of the one man in history documented as having been killed by a falling tortoise.

Solutions to the June problems have now been published.
Solutions to the July problems will appear in September.