Imperial Schools - Diplomat Yearbook (Gladewater, TX)

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:yi ' f71sf?f7'Vi?p1,sw: , Tetrahedron Dodecahedron GROWING SALT CRYSTALS The beauty and splendor of a crystal is right at the fingertips of almost anyone. lt is fun as well as educational to grow your own crystals. All you need is some salt or sugar, a piece of string, a stick, a wide mouth jar or glass, and some water. Dis- solve the salt lor sugarl in water until you have a saturated solution, Then take the piece of string and tie it around the stick. Place the stick across the mouth of the iar with the string suspended in the salt solution. After a few days or so crys- tals will begin to grow on the string. The 1- A longer the crystals-arepermittedicrgrovr the largerqthey will become. As the water evaporates more saturated salt solution can be added to continue crystal growth. Icosahedron

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SALT AND DIAMONDS Many minerals form beautiful crystals with smooth Hat faces and sharp edges. In some of these crystals, the faces are regular olygons that have the same size and shape, with t e same number of polygons at each corner. A solid that is built in this way is called a regular solid. There are exactly five regular solids. Their names show the number of faces that they have. The tetrahedron Qfour facesj is made of tri- angles. The loexgzbedronnor cube fsix facesj is made of squares. The qbctahedron feight facesj is made of triangles. The dodecabedron ftwelve facesj is made of entagons. The icosahedron ftwenty facesj is ma e of triangles. If you look at table salt under a magnifying glass, you will see that each crystal is a cube. A diamond crystal is an octahedron. As practice with rulers and protractors for measuring lines and angles, elementary students constructed a series of regular polygons Qequal angled and equal sided Hat figuresj. From these they then ventured into the world of three dimen- sions and experimented with constructing regular solids. As knowledge and interest increased they attempted numerous original figures as well, us- ing a variety of polygons. After much trial and error students soon realized that orderliness and perfection are not the result of accident and chance but of carefully executed design and workmanship. e 5 'Y 5 is 'X- if :iii11553u7f57TL3il5,i5ifJi 7 E551-35: 3 idwigawws V . , . V My-2:w5. . e e'-se 1:1122 . away eg wK1Ks vi s a? Masfswff za H up ' Mi by . as ,S E S ki X . 5 5 is iff fa Rf .gfifi-2255 ,R 3625 ?aQ5?f.:zE. 11 ' mg. gui 'fbffuifwiiezs M ' from the osfer esigner --1-in .fi-1 Hexaheclron lCubel Odahedron

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an - '- +'re-9' nr- HRV if-I fu, .4 Mathematics is not only a body of know- ledge but also a special kind of language -- perfect and abstract. Its grammar is deter- mined by rules of logic and its vocabulary in- cludes symbols such as: numerals, letters or placeholders to represent unknown numbers, equations for relationships between numbers, and a series of symbols to indicate various operations and to act as a sort of mathematical shorthand. Man has, through his discoveries in mathe- matics, realized the order and perfection ex- tant throughout the entire universe. Whether he deals with the microscopic or the astro- nomical, there is witnessed order, symmetry, and law. All of which can be expressed in mathematical terms. It appears that almost all physical knowledge can be reduced to mathematical expressions. This has lead one famous physicist to declare, The Great Architect of the Universe now begins to ap- pear as a pure mathematician. In one sense, the study of mathematics becomes the study of law. The approach to studying mathematics to- day has become one of discovering the pat- terns and orderly relationships of numbers. Students soon learn the why of mathe- matical structure and not just the how.