American Olympic sprinter LoLo Jones wears a necklace that sez Lo^2 See picture here: http://www.spikesmag.com/features/lolojonesonthestoryofthepicture.aspx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolo_Jones So she clearly appreciates algebra. At 09:34 AM 8/1/2012, Mike Stay wrote:

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 5:06 PM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:

...

I can easily come up with elementary applications of square roots, but are there any (many?) elementary/high school applications of the quadratic formula?

Most sports involve parabolic motion somewhere. Ask kids to estimate Michael Jordan's hang time (the time in the air during a jump) and you'll usually get answers ranging from a second to ten seconds; they're really surprised when you ask them to count during a video. There's a simple mat in many gyms that will measure the height of your jump by timing it; it's a puzzle at first to figure out how it knows how high you jumped, since there's no laser rangefinder or anything like that. It's also very visceral. -- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com