Math

Young people don't often rank math as high as, say, video games, hip-hop music, or skateboarding. But a new exhibition at the Franklin Institute is intended to make something vividly clear: It's hard to have fun without mathematics. "Design Zone," which opened last weekend and continues through April 1, offers a series of hands-on creative tools and challenges to help illustrate the relationship between math and the fields of art, music, and engineering. Three interactive areas invite visitors to construct dance grooves, miniature towers, and virtual skate ramps, among other challenges, while illustrating that math makes it possible.

WELL, HE didn't really look like Groucho Marx. But one of his advanced-calculus students said Marvin Knopp had a "Groucho-like" delivery. He might not have been as funny as the Marx brother either, but his rich sense of humor was known to keep his students riveted on a subject that most people would not find very amusing. Marvin Isadore Knopp, a nationally known mathematician who, as a professor in the math department of Temple University since 1976, and other schools before that, managed to make the intricacies of higher mathematics a fascinating subject, died suddenly on Christmas Eve on a family vacation in Boca Raton, Fla. He was 78. Before coming to Temple, Marvin taught at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and at the University of Chicago.

Herbert S. Wilf, 80, of Penn Valley, emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) Saturday, Jan. 7, at Lankenau Hospital. Dr. Wilf joined the Penn faculty in 1962. For him, teaching and research were deeply intertwined, his wife, Ruth Tumen Wilf, said. In 1973, Dr. Wilf received Penn's Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, and in 1996, he received the Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for excellence in teaching mathematics from the Mathematical Association of America.

By Dennis C. McCornac The information age is in full bloom. Rapid developments in technology let us store, retrieve, and analyze data - available, literally, at our fingertips - at an unprecedented rate. Journals, newspapers, websites, and cable television bombard readers and viewers with statistics and statistical analysis. Opinion polls tell us how we think or feel and who will win an election before the voting takes place. As reliable or unreliable as the flood of statistical information may be, it inevitably forms the basis for countless important decisions.

When a basketball team turns the ball over 21 times, shoots 40 percent from the foul line, and lets a large lead dwindle, that team should probably be a bit alarmed. Unless the name Chester runs across the front of the jersey. Then, it seems, all those negatives can be shrugged off. In fact, you can still win a game despite a whole bunch of sloppiness. In an encounter between reigning state champions, Class AAAA champ Chester withstood Class A titlist Math, Civics & Sciences, 64-52, Saturday at Cheltenham as part of Coaches vs. Cancer event.

On the campus of Cheyney University, a school that is no stranger to financial hardship, professor Adedoyin M. Adeyiga is a rainmaker. The African-born chemistry professor, whose father is a king in Nigeria, has secured more than $5 million in grants for programming to increase minority participation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). An additional $1.35 million is pending. Adeyiga, or "Dr. A. " as he is known on campus, works furiously to stop students from shunning a subject and career path that many consider scary and intimidating.

The rookie principal fired in 2006 after he alleged Camden school officials pressured him to change test scores at Dr. Charles E. Brimm Medical Arts High School will be paid $860,000 by the school district to settle his civil lawsuit. The school board unanimously approved the settlement with Joseph Carruth last week, according to a copy of the resolution made available Tuesday. Carruth's possible reinstatement also is being discussed, according to several sources familiar with the case.

The rookie principal fired in 2006 after he alleged Camden school officials pressured him to change test scores at Dr. Charles E. Brimm Medical Arts High School will be paid $860,000 by the school district to settle his civil lawsuit. The school board unanimously approved the settlement with Joseph Carruth last week, according to a copy of the resolution made available Tuesday. Carruth's possible reinstatement also is being discussed, according to several sources familiar with the case.

WASHINGTON - Some progress. Still needs improvement. The nation's report card on math and reading shows fourth and eighth graders scoring their best ever in math, and eighth graders making some progress in reading. But the results released Tuesday show how far the nation's schoolchildren are from achieving the No Child Left Behind law's goal that every child in America be proficient in math and reading by 2014. Just more than one-third of the students were proficient or higher in reading.

Union goalkeeper Zac MacMath has taken the traditional path to soccer, unlike his father. The younger MacMath has been playing the game since he was 4, although for the longest time he was a field player and, apparently, an accomplished one at that. Compare that to his father, Gary, recruited off the basketball court in gym class at Frankford High by legendary soccer coach Walter Bahr because the program needed a keeper. So even though Gary has been a longtime resident of St. Petersburg, Fla., his soccer roots were in Philadelphia.