Adventures in Math Problem Solving: Strange and Beautiful Numbers (Advanced)

Eligibility Criteria:

Ei ASSET Talent Search Gold, Silver and Bronze scholars (or equivalent), with a minimum score of 80 percentile in Math in Ei ATS; Students currently in grade 8, 9 or 10

Mathematicians are not human calculators. They are observers who learn to see what the untrained eye does not notice and thinkers who use logic to look beyond the obvious.

We begin this course by investigating some of the surprising strangeness and beauty lurking in ‘everyday’ numbers such as fractions and integers. From this foundation, we launch into an exploration of irrational and imaginary numbers—some of the more unusual types of numbers taught in middle and high school. Finally, we head off into the stratosphere of strangeness: quaternions, p-adic numbers, and cardinal and ordinal numbers. Along the way, we will count different sizes of infinities; we will encounter numerals whose digits can repeat forever leftward but not rightward; and we will even find numbers that show us how an object might spin around in four dimensions. By the time you have finished this course, you will never see numbers in quite the same way again!

The highly interactive sessions will involve working independently and in small groups as well as sharing and discussing your work with others. After each interactive session, students will work on their own to extend the problems further and frame questions for future exploration. Students will submit the assignments and their questions and will receive feedback and responses from the instructor.

Sessions: 14 sessions of 90 minutes each with homework assignments; Fridays 630 PM; starts Fri, Oct 15 and will end by February 2022 1st week; There will be breaks on some saturdays in-between keeping in mind major festivals.

Testimonials from Parents (of past participants of Jerry’s courses):

"Every day Jerry assigns work; his comments on the submitted assignment are so good; he provides clues for moving to the next step. I am a student of Math myself. Jerry is doing a great job which cannot be valued in money terms. Lucky are his students!"

"My son is extremely interested in Math and Science (and a lot of other things, but primarily math and science). Genwise and Jerry Burkhart kindly let him do courses with older kids. Some behaviour issues that would come with younger age were handled very well. I have not seen my son so happy learning math from someone else earlier. Amazing part, even after the courses, Jerry still answers his emails and encourages him to think further on the problem."

Jerry talks about the goal of his courses in this short film.