geometry

Building a bunk bed requires a lot of calculations and manipulations of numbers. But it was mostly straight forward until I got to the ladder part. Then I had to take out my calculator and figure out the angles, what my piece of wood had to look like in order to make it square with the rest of the bunk bed. It was a great application of my sin, cos, and tan and pythagoras theorem from junior high school.

As I was making braised beef short ribs for dinner the other night, I was faced with the question of which piece of cookware to use - the rectangular lasagna pan (in the shape of a rectangular cube) or the circular Dutch oven (in the shape of a cylinder)? Or did it even matter? I wanted to use the piece of cookware with the largest volume possible since I had a lot of short ribs and wanted to cover them completely with broth. Without using specific numbers, how would I go about finding out which piece of cookware has the largest volume?

When you own an outdoor swimming pool, in the spring you need to "shock" it, which means add a large amount of chlorine, in order to kill all the backteria and algea that accumulated over the fall/winter/spring. But chlorine is expensive, so you don't want to add too much (and waste it). In order to figure out how much to add, you need to figure out the volume of your pool, since the label on the chlorine tells you how much to add per litre of water.

This is a great list of all the different fields that require math:

http://www.ams.org/mathmoments

First, you need to know how big to make the quilt. For example, a crib quilt might be in the neighborhood of 50 x 60 inches, whereas a queen size quilt would be more like 94 x 108 inches. You can figure this out by measuring the mattress and allowing for the length of overhang you want (on both sides, and the bottom, and enough to cover the pillows if desired on the top).  Or, you can find a chart that tells you standard quilt sizes.  

An engineer working on a combustion experiment needs to create a rectangular plate with evenly spaced holes for the gas to go through.  The plate needs to be 100 cm by 50 cm (to fit into the machine), and the holes must be staggered, 3 cm apart.  One way she thinks of doing is to have the holes drilled in one row, all 3 cm apart.  For the next row, she was thinking of shifting the holes over, so that the holes make the vertices of equilateral triangles, with the previous row.  Then this would continue for the next rows, until the plate is completely drilled with holes.  The object o