Virginia Mathematics Teacher Spring 2017

Ladson-Billings, G. (1997). It doesn’t add up: African American students’ mathematics achievement. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 28 (6), 697 – 708 Martin, D. B. (2012). Learning mathematics while black . Educational Foundations, 26 (1), 47 – 66. Mayfield, K. H., & Glenn, I. M. (2008). An evaluation of interventions to facilitate algebra problem solving. Journal of Behavioral Education, 17 (3), 278-302. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10864-008- 9068-z Moses, R. P., & Cobb, C. E. (2002). Radical equations: Math literacy and civil rights . Boston: Beacon Press.

Noble, R., III. (2011). Mathematics self-efficacy and African-American male students: An examination of models of success. Journal of African American Males in Education, 2 (2), 188 – 213. Warner, R.M. (2013). Applied statistics: From bivariate through multivariate techniques. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

Andrew Wynn Professor of Mathematics Virginia State University Ahwynn@vsu.edu

*Photos of the other three authors were not provided

So l ut i ons t o Fa l l 2016 HEXA Cha l l enge Probl ems

October: It is 2016. If we continue writing the digits, 2, 0, 1, 6, in this order N times, we’ll get a different number K=201620162016...2016 where the digits 2, 0,1, 6 are repeated N times. Prove that K cannot be a per- fect square of any integer number. SOLUTION : 20162016=10001*2016 The number K can be written as the sequence of digits 2016….2016. If A is a positive integer, then K can be written as There are N people that live in a city, where there are two main competing companies. Out of these people, n know each other, because they work for the same company. m people also know each other because they work in the same city, but in a rival company. Personal relationships between workers at rival companies are not allowed. What portion of the population of the city, does not work for either of these companies, but can knows exactly 1 person from each company. SOLUTION Let’s estimate the probability of this scenario, as described in the problem. There is no A that makes K a perfect square. November:

The relevant portion of the population is

December: Given an infinitely large set of different types of triangles, if one randomly selects a triangle, what are the chances of this triangle being obtuse?

Virginia Mathematics Teacher vol. 43, no. 2

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