Number Sense

1. Introduction Number sense is an area that even some of the more advanced students can have trouble with, simply because it is not a topic that is explicitly mentioned in middle school curricula or that can really be covered in a unit, but rather a culmination of the students mathematical experiences to date. The key to building strong number sense is just practice. The more experience a student has with manipulating numbers, the better they will become at understanding how they work and fully understanding how to use them. Even at grade 8, it is still worthwhile to have activities that exercise things that we assume students should know well such as times tables, divisibility rules, order of operations, least common multiples, and greatest common divisors. Typically students are made to memorize these rules and formulas, though they are never given a reason why they work. For some students this might only serve to further confuse them if they are struggling with math, but for advanced students this gives them the skills to be able to figure out these rules and formulas on their own, which is the type of thinking skills that we would ideally like to foster in our students. Also, because many problems on math contests require several calculation steps, good number sense allows students to quickly calculate things in their heads rather than trying to work it out on paper, a task that eats away at the time limit that students are given to complete the contest. One theorem that is very important, and has many implications on how we are able to manipulate numbers, is the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, which states that each natural number (except 1) has a unique prime factorization. Although teachers may bring this up from time to time as a fact that students should be aware of, students are typically not given the proof of why this theorem holds, even though it is very much within the range of what some middle school students are capable of understanding and gives the sense that the foundations of what they are learning is not based on some kind of magic, but rather on logic and deductive reasoning. The proof requires that we first prove the existence, and then uniqueness: 1) 2) 3) Existence Assume that we know that each number up to a random number n is either prime or has a prime factorization. If n is prime then we already know that it has a prime factorization (one times itself). If not, then it has factors which are smaller than itself, say a and b. Since we already know that every number less than n has a prime factorization,

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and a and b are both smaller than n, a and b have prime factorizations, and so consequently n must have a prime factorization. Now we know that all numbers up to n + 1 have prime factorizations, so by the same reasoning we can deduce that n + 1 has a prime factorization, and continue this process up to any number, and so every number must have a prime factorization.

Uniqueness 1) Assume that some random number n has two different prime factorizations p1p2p3px and q1q2q3qy, where each pi and each qi is a prime. 2) Since p1 divides n, we can say that p1 divides some qi also, say q1; and since q1 is prime, p1 and q1 must be equal, otherwise p1 could not divide q1. 3) This means that we can say that p2p3p4px = q2q3q4qy. 4) If we continued this process of elimination down to px and there is more than one qi on the other side of the equation, then px can be written as a product of the qi and is therefore not a prime. 5) This means that when we get down to just px we will only have qy on the other side of the equation and so the prime factorization must be unique. Another proof in a similar stream that equally as important that has just as many applications that can be shown to students is the divisibility algorithm and its proof. Again, it is a very straightforward idea with a clever but comprehensible proof that advanced middle school students will get. The more familiar students are with proofs like this, the easier it is to use the theorem comfortably and with confidence. This theorem in particular will help students build their own strategies for factoring quickly in their heads. For further practice get students to do Kenken puzzles (see the part 3 of the logic section for a great online Kenken resource). Other proofs that we can give students to enhance their level of understanding are proofs for each divisibility rule. For example divisibility by 3: A number is divisible by 3 if the sum of its digits is divisible by 3. 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) Say some number n is divisible by 3, and its digits are represented by abc. abc = 100a + 10b + c abc = (99a + a) + (9b + b) + c abc = (99a + 9b) + a + b + c Since (99a + 9b) is divisible by 3, (a + b + c) must also be divisible by 3 in order for abc to be divisible by 3.

A similar proof can be shown for division rules for any number. Its great to show students tricks like this so that they can develop their own ways of working more efficiently and quickly through problems, but in order for this to be a useful learning tool students need to understand the mechanics of why they work to fully grasp the universality of the theorem. Another area that students can strengthen is working with gcds and lcms. Once students have a good grasp on prime factorization, finding gcds becomes a much

more straightforward and easy task because they know that they can simply find the primes that they have in common and multiply them together. A student well exercised in division rules should be able to mentally find a prime factorization relatively quickly. But then students are told things like the lcm of those two numbers is their product because they are relatively prime without any explanation. Again, a good understanding of prime factorization will help students, and some of the more advanced students might come to the conclusion that two numbers are relatively prime if they have no common values in their prime factorizations, which is what you want them to come up with. But then what does relatively prime have to do with the lcm? To build a stronger understanding, prove to students that the lcm of two numbers is their product divided by their gcd: Intuitively, it makes sense that the lcm of two numbers is the smallest number that contains all of the prime factors of both numbers. For example: 12 = 2 x 2 x 3 80 = 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 5 So it makes sense that 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 3 x 5 should be the lcm of 12 and 80 because if one of those numbers was missing it would not be a multiple of one of those numbers. By looking at the prime factorizations we can clearly see that the gcd of the numbers is 2 x 2. Multiplying the two numbers together we get: 12 x 80 = 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 3 x 5 lcm (12, 80) = 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 3 x 5 = 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 3 x 5 / 2 x 2 so lcm (12, 80) = 12 x 80 / gcd(12,80) This example illustrates clearly why lcm(a,b) = ab/gcd(a,b). It also makes it clear why the lcm of two relatively prime numbers is their product. Relatively prime numbers have no common factors, so their lcm will be all of their prime factors multiplied together, or in other words the product of the two numbers. These are very strong ideas, and only a few of many, that students sadly usually only get a glimpse of. Once it the students have the formula it can be checked off the list of outcomes and that is it. And that is usually how students encounter these ideas, simply as a rule or a formula. Even if these topics are not explicitly covered in middle school curricula as outcomes, it is certainly worth exposing students to these types of explanations and proofs because they have probably not been allowed the chance to build a connection to these ideas, which at the very least puts them at a disadvantage when they are expected to be familiar enough with these ideas to know when and how to use them on a math contest.

2. Sample Problems 1) Three integers multiply to get 72. What is the smallest possible sum of these three integers? 2) Which is the largest from the following fractions?: 3) What is the sum of every digit in the numbers from 1 to 100? 4) You want to but a baseball bat and a baseball. You know that the cost of both together is $110 and that the bat is $100 more than the ball. What is the price if the ball? 5) Your mom and dad each give you $50 to buy a new bike. The bike costs $97 so you have $3 left after. You give your parents each $1, and keep the other dollar. You now owe each parent $49. But 49 + 49 + 1 = 99. Where did the other dollar go? 6) You go to a horse race and on the track you count 74 heads and 196 legs. How many people and horses are there? 7) If ten workers can dig five holes in two days, how many holes can five workers dig in ten days? These are just a few examples of the types of questions you want students to be prepared for. These are the type of problems where there is no formula to find the solution, ones that are not part of a larger group of problems where you can teach students a right or wrong way to approach solving them. These are the types of problems that they are likely to ask on a math contest because they show the students ability to problem-solve and not their ability to write down what they know. Students need to be comfortable enough with numbers to be able to manipulate them with confidence and understand why their solution, and means of finding it, makes sense. They need to develop their own way of problem solving so that they can work through these types of problems. These problems may not be directly related to the proofs and explanations offered in the previous section, but that is because the point of giving the student these proofs and explanations is not to make sure that they know that theorem very well, but to expose them to more advanced ways of thinking so that they can strengthen their mathematical confidence, and exercise their thinking skills so that they are able to find a reasonable approach to solving these kinds of problems. Giving students mathematical concepts that they are able to understand immediately does nothing to build thinking skills and so builds a false sense of achievement.

3. Resources 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNU7IBMAGc4 Great video about basic number sense Only the first of the Do the Math series on number sense. The rest can be found as links on the left of the webpage Great resource to find topics that students may not have talked about in a year or two to review

2) http://www.cemc.uwaterloo.ca/contests/past_contests.html Webpage with Gauss math contests from previous years Contains over ten years of contests with solutions Great resource for finding challenging problems for students that are not only related to number sense, but other math topics as well

3) http://www.cut-the-knot.org/proofs/ Great resource for teachers to find simple proofs to show to students Some of the proofs are very mathematically written, but can be simplified to a language that students can understand

4) http://www.teachers.yale.edu/curriculum/viewer/initiative_11.06.11_u Great resource document for boosting number sense of high school students, but parts of it are definitely worth using in a middle school setting Contains great examples and activities

5) http://online.math.uh.edu/MiddleSchool/Vocabulary/NumberTheoryVocab. pdf Very good list of key mathematical terms Students should know a lot of them already, which can be used as review Ones that students do not know already can be an opportunity to learn something new

6) http://home.comcast.net/~dgarlock/Index.htm

Click on the Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 links to get great resource of basic number theory and number sense topics at a high school level, some of which would be suitable to advanced middle school math students