Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Pyramid Tea Bag

In the pack of 100 Lipton (regular) Tea Bags I get a free gift of 1 Green Tea Bag. Ooh the shape is different! It is not shaped like regular tea bags...
It... it is a pyramid! It tastes good, although I like red tea with cream more than green tea.

Ok, so pyramid bag is new trend to tea bags to get more flavor. Innovation can still occur for established products.

This type of pyramid has a triangle bottom. Who can tell me the exact name for this shape?

Yes, it is the tetrahedron!
High school geometry students should know this. Ok, wiki provide a ton of formulas for it. I admit I have never seen most of these listed there.
Tetrahedrons don't come up that often in a typical math education, and the formulas probably shouldn't be too hard to derive.

The tetrahedron is part of a family known as the Platonic Solids.
People are stunned by the beauty of these shapes since the beginning of mathematics (I am not exaggerating)

The aesthetic beauty and symmetry of the Platonic solids have made them a favorite subject of geometers for thousands of years.

Kepler even associated that with the known planets. He was wrong with this. But his laws are foundation of the world we live in! (This amazing set of 3 laws are often eclipsed by the Newton's laws of motion)

2 comments:

Alex Mak said...

The Chinese Zongzi also have a geometric shape. Has there been any math problems finding the volume of a food?

High school math is cool but turned off lots of people.

Mathematicians LOVE to get to get exact answers, not numerical estimates, they want the real thing in an expression.

Given an expression, they want it simplified.

Joseph Mak said...

well simplified form just gets people on the same page. 1/4 = 2/8 = 4/16 etc.... to avoid conflicts we simplify it as 1/4.

The zong's shape is too complex... requires some heavy duty stuff to describe the surface.