This week we are cheering to Tracy Z. who slowly and consistently climbed toward 50 puzzle points, and honoring Tracy with an exclusive interview.
Congratulations, Tracy! As you were answering these questions, you were preparing to go camping on the Cape Cod. In this picture you sent you are also hiking with a baby in tow and what seems like a giant backpack. What an amazing energy!
This picture is of me and one of my kids on a trip that we take every winter. We and friends hike into a very rustic cabin (no electricity, no plumbing) in VT for a long weekend, and carry all our gear in via backpacks and sleds. We’ve been doing it since pre-kid days. I spend a lot of time for work and at home in front of computers. Many of my fondest memories though come from the times when I unplug the computer and get outside for a weekend, a week, or longer. I love hiking, biking, kayaking, and cross-country skiing and snowshoeing.
Tracy, have
you ever had a big or little life dilemma that you solved with math?
Little: I’ve used math to estimate a number I can’t
actually fully compute. For example, in
a contest to guess the number of peanuts in a very large bag, I came closer
than anyone else and won the whole bag. It
was too much to eat.
Bigger:
At my house, we once wanted to estimate
where a property line was located without having to hire a surveyor. We wanted to know which trees were on our
property and which were on an adjacent property. We found survey markers for two corners (A
& B) on one side of the property and used very long pieces of string and
triangle geometry to estimate the border on an adjacent side of the property. Here are the details: We took the straight line distance between A
and B (let’s call the distance x) and assumed the adjacent border from corner A
to the unknown point C would be a right angle to side AB (the assessors’ property
maps suggested the angle was 90% or very close to it). We created a string of length x and a second
string of length (sqrt(2))*x. We tied
the x- length string at corner A, and tied the (sqrt(2))*x-length string at
corner B. At corners A and B, we then rotated
the two strings until they intersected when each string was fully extended. This intersection point was point C. Once we knew C, we knew side AC was on the
property border. AC was long enough to
go past the trees in question, but if it had not been, we could have run
another longer string along AC as far as needed.
Have
you ever did any miscalculation using logic and numbers in real life?
One
type of miscalculation I make far too frequently is underestimating how long it
will take me to get somewhere, such as for an appointment. I think about what time the appointment
starts, and then make the assumption that that time it will take me to get
there will be the minimum time that such a trip would take under ideal
conditions with no delays of any kind. I
allow for little margin of error and as a result I am often a wee bit late. Fortunately,
I had just a few times where I have been very late. Too bad personal teleportation is not yet an
option.
Do or
did you ever use math professionally?
I
use math personally and professionally almost every day. I was a math major in
college. In my professional life, I have had positions gathering and analyzing
data regarding: the energy and cost savings of energy-efficient household
appliances; the population, economic, and land use trends for regions and
communities; and the contributing factors behind motor vehicle crashes and
fatalities. I currently work in a
research laboratory that conducts studies of driver behavior (such as driver
distraction) in driving simulators and on-road environments. We collect a variety of data on our
participants during their sessions, including their demographic and driving
histories, and their eye movements, head movements, their travel speed,
acceleration, and lane deviation while driving, and use this data to develop
training programs to improve drivers’ skills.
Some
people say that best ideas come to them in the shower, for some it is while
they are asleep, for some - while they are jogging. For you, what conditions,
mood or environment are the most optimal to tackle a hard puzzle?
I
get many of my best ideas for how to proceed on a hard problem when I outside
walking or biking. I also get great
ideas, especially for Math Mom puzzlers and other brain teasers, by talking
them over with my spouse or kids. They
love math and logic puzzles as much as I do.
To whom
or what you are attributing your interest in math – a teacher, parent, TV
program?
There
are two people to whom I attribute my interest in math and logic. The first is John Powers, a wonderful teacher
who mentored me in middle school. He encouraged me to create a book of logic
puzzles and to develop a curriculum to teach logic skills to kindergarteners
and first graders. The second is Dr. Arthur Eisenkraft, my high school physics
teacher. He frequently had us put down our textbooks and engage in real-life
exercises to better understand the concepts he was teaching us. We’d have labs where we threw and hit
baseballs (studying speed and distance); dropped objects out of 3-story windows
(gravity), and honked car horns while driving at different speeds (Doppler
effect). He made science and equations live.
Dr. Eisenkraft now runs a center at UMass-Boston that focuses on
improving the teaching and learning of science and math for all students, from
kindergarten through graduate school.
