Inauguration Estimation
For this assignment, we got a satellite image of Obama's first inauguration crowd that was watching him. We estimated how many people were there.
Method:
I divided the whole total by 2.25 because I gave everybody a 1.5 by 1.5 feet square for them to stand in. Two habits of a mathematician that I used would be Being confident, patient, and persistent, and also generalizing. Even though I had to fix some mistakes and got stuff wrong, I just went back and fixed my work and moved on. I also generalized my work so that I could come up with a method that I used. I didn't include all of the work and just focused on what I did with the numbers to get to my answer.
Method:
- First, I made shapes around the major black splotches of people watching in the streets.
- Second, I found the area using a ruler and a scale that I created (1in=550ft) which I found when our teacher told us that the distance from the capital building to the washington monument is roughly 1.2 miles.
- Third, my group found more minor black splotches and we estimated the area based on the major groups of people we found.
- Fourth, I divided the whole area by 2.25 to get my total people number: roughly 1.2 million people.
I divided the whole total by 2.25 because I gave everybody a 1.5 by 1.5 feet square for them to stand in. Two habits of a mathematician that I used would be Being confident, patient, and persistent, and also generalizing. Even though I had to fix some mistakes and got stuff wrong, I just went back and fixed my work and moved on. I also generalized my work so that I could come up with a method that I used. I didn't include all of the work and just focused on what I did with the numbers to get to my answer.