Secretly Math
Five players score 4, 7, 8, 12, and 30 goals. This measure of the group is 8.
What is the median?
Males of this familiar buzzing insect don't bite people at all; they feed on flower nectar and other plant sugars.
What is a mosquito?
Freeze the soccer game at the instant a pass is made. If an attacker is beyond both the ball and the second-last opponent and then gets involved in the play, this rule may stop the attack.
What is offside?
A fern leaf looks a bit like a tiny fern made of smaller fern-like pieces. This kind of repeating-at-different-scales geometry is called this.
What is a fractal?
Percy Spencer noticed a candy bar in his pocket melting while he worked near a magnetron, a surprise that helped lead to this kitchen appliance.
What is the microwave oven?
Money can earn more money simply by sitting in an account. The money it earns is called this.
What is interest?
A dog finds one of these tiny wrinkled fruits under the table. Unfortunately, something that small can cause serious kidney damage in dogs.
What is a raisin?
Your soccer goalkeeper gets to use her hands, but not when a teammate deliberately kicks the ball back to her. That's because of this rule.
What is the back-pass rule?
Divide neighboring Fibonacci numbers: 13 ÷ 8, then 21 ÷ 13, then 34 ÷ 21. The answers creep closer to about 1.618, this famous ratio.
What is the golden ratio?
A scientist trying to invent an extremely strong glue instead created one that stuck lightly and could be removed. That “failure” eventually became essential to this office product.
What is a Post-it Note?
A striker takes 20 penalties and misses exactly 20% of them. This many went in.
What is 16?
A program contains thousands of perfectly good instructions and one tiny wrong character that makes the whole thing crash. Programmers call the problem this.
What is a computer bug?
The defender touches the shot after its upward journey has become a downward one. Basketball has a special name for this violation.
What is goaltending?
Count the sides of a classic honeycomb cell and you'll usually arrive at six, giving it the name of this polygon.
What is a hexagon?
Alexander Fleming saw that bacteria would not grow near a mold that had accidentally contaminated his culture plate, an observation that led to this antibiotic.
What is penicillin?
A turtle starts 8 feet from some lettuce. Each move covers exactly half of the distance still remaining: 4 feet remain, then 2, then 1, then ½. In the mathematical version of this endless journey, the remaining distance gets closer and closer to this number.
What is zero?
Cold rubber returns to shape more slowly than warm rubber. That seemingly simple fact became disastrously important for these small seals aboard Challenger.
What is an O-ring?
The shot clock gives an NBA offense 24 seconds overall, but only this many to get the ball across half court.
What is eight seconds?
A ball rises quickly, slows vertically to zero at its peak, then speeds downward again; plot its height over time and you get this U-shaped curve.
What is a parabola?
Röntgen was experimenting with cathode rays when a fluorescent screen elsewhere in his lab mysteriously began glowing, eventually leading him to discover these rays.
What are X-rays?
A googol is written as 10¹⁰⁰. In that expression, the little raised 100 has this mathematical job.
What is an exponent?
This fingernail-sized invasive mollusk can reproduce in huge numbers and clog pipes and water-intake systems.
What is a zebra mussel?
Baseball can record a strikeout and still allow that same batter to reach first base safely because of this peculiar rule.
What is the dropped third strike rule?
M.C. Escher famously transformed birds, fish, and reptiles into repeating patterns that completely cover a surface, examples of this geometric idea.
What is a tessellation?
Roy Plunkett was trying to develop a new refrigerant when gas inside a cylinder unexpectedly turned into a slippery white solid, eventually marketed under this name.
What is Teflon?