Related papers: Funny Problems!
The textbook contains the problems in mechanics and special relativity for physics departments of universities. Many original problems were proposed by active scientists from the institutes of the Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of…
For many years, I have been collecting math jokes and posting them on my website. I have more than 400 jokes there. In this paper, which is an extended version of my talk at the G4G15, I would like to present 66 of them.
Astrophysical paradoxes are the paradoxes of physics. The main motivation of a formulated paradox is clearly recognized in the scientific environment because the phenomenon of a paradox itself has become interesting. There is an explanation…
Paradoxes are a relatively frequent occurrence in physics. The nature of their genesis is diverse and they are found in all branches of physics. There are a number of general and special classifications of paradoxes, but there are no…
Many mathematicians find mathematics aesthetically beautiful and even comparable to art forms such as music or painting. On the other hand, every year a great number of school students leave mathematics with total disillusionment and…
Equations are about more than computing physical quantities or constructing formal models; they are also about understanding. The conceptual systems physicists use to think about nature are made from many different resources, formal and…
I will report below on a few examples of raving and insane (or maybe utterly genial) sentences that can be found in famous and otherwise admirable books of physics, because I genuinely believe it is amusing.
Traditionally, scholars in physics education research pay attention to students solving well-structured learning activities, which provide restricted room for collaboration and idea-generation due to their close-ended nature. In order to…
[Taken from the "README" in the book] My goal with this book is to provide some kind of bridge for mathematics between the high-school-level and college-level for physics students. From my perspective, our job as physicists is to observe…
Previous research has found that introductory physics students perform far better on numeric problems than on otherwise equivalent symbolic problems. This paper describes a framework to explain these differences developed by analyzing…
We discuss how a class of difficult kinematic problems can play an important role in an introductory course in stimulating students' reasoning on more complex physical situations. The problems presented here have an elementary analysis once…
The paradoxes of thermodynamics and statistical physics are unavoidable in the study of physical paradoxes because of their importance at the time they came to be as well as the frequency of their appearance in historical studies of…
Physics and mathematics are difficult enough without the aditional burden of bad habits. In this article, we examine some helpful habits that tend to be underemphasized by many physics teachers (mainly because they seem so obvious!).
Diagrams are ubiquitous in physics, especially in physics education and physics problem solving. Problem solvers may generate diagrams to orient to a scenario, to organize information, to directly extract an answer, or as a tool of…
One finding of cognitive research is that people do not automatically acquire usable knowledge by spending lots of time on task. Because students' knowledge hierarchy is more fragmented, "knowledge chunks" are smaller than those of experts.…
A primary goal of physics is to create mathematical models that allow both predictions and explanations of physical phenomena. We weave maths extensively into our physics instruction beginning in high school, and the level and complexity of…
I'll discuss how Goedel's paradox "This statement is false/unprovable" yields his famous result on the limits of axiomatic reasoning. I'll contrast that with my work, which is based on the paradox of "The first uninteresting positive whole…
We describe the development of a junior-senior level course for Physics majors designed to teach Mathematica skills in support of their undergraduate coursework, but also to introduce students to modern research level results. Standard…
In this paper we discuss how teaching of mathematics for middle school and high school students can be improved dramatically when motivation of concepts and ideas is done through the classical problems and the history of mathematics. This…
Identifying the relevant physics principles is a central component of problem solving. A major goal of most introductory physics courses is to help students discern the deep similarities between problems based upon the physics principles so…