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Brightest Moon for Thousands of Millennia? (Math Chat)

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Visit this site: http://www.maa.org/features/mathchat/mathchat_2_17_00.html
Author:Frank Morgan, MAA Online
Description: Answer to the challenge: Was there any validity to the claim that the full moon of December 22, 1999 was the brightest that we shall see for millions of years? (Factors that coincided.) New challenge: Eric Brahinsky saw in an article on "New molecule has explosive future" on January 31 in the San Antonio Express-News, reprinted from the New York Times: "According to Plato, the tetrahedron (four triangles) represents fire, the cube (four squares) symbolizes earth, the octahedron (eight triangles) stands for air, the icosahedron (20 triangles) represents water and the dodecahedron (12 pentagons), the universe." Of course, the cube has six faces, not four. Readers are invited to send in more examples of questionable mathematics from the media.
Levels: High School (9-12), College
Languages: English
Resource Types: Problems/Puzzles, Articles
Math Topics: Triangles and Other Polygons, Astronomy

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