The Nueva School's Innovative Learning Conference

Perfect numbers are a perfect portal into advanced arithmetic for the mathematically gifted and curious student. But how do we find a perfect number? Using a combination of colored interlinking blocks and paper and pencil, participants will find the sum of the divisors of the numbers from 1 to 12. Visual patterns will emerge, deductions and discoveries will be made. Each sum has different characteristics: some sums have characteristics in common, but, as the blocks will illustrate, perfect numbers have a special arithmetic feature. Participants will create hands-on visual representations of the first 3 perfect numbers, and discover that perfect numbers are also triangle numbers, which share an internal structure.