Fun in the Sun - Using Mathematics to Tell Time on the Beach
By Joe Pagano

Christmas is a week away, temperatures have been hovering in the teens, and I?™m writing about fun in the sun and something about using mathematics to tell time on the beach! Good gracious. You must be thinking how weird I am. Well maybe, but for those who have been following some of my other articles, you know then that I seek to show how mathematics?”yes even basic mathematics?”functions so universally throughout our everyday lives. Even the layman can use this beautiful tool do so many common and ordinary things!

Perhaps while I sit here clacking at my keyboard, the chill running through my body forces me to hark back to the bright halcyon July and August days when I frolicked in the sand and listened attentively to the rhythmic crashing of the waves?”and of course, contemplated the hour of the day by observing the position of the sun in the sky. Now some might be thinking, ?œWait. Navigators and sailors have used the stars and celestial bodies for time immemorial to do such things as tell time, pinpoint their position on the globe, tell their course of direction, and to make sundry other determinations.??I know this.

Yet once again, while spending some time at the beach one day, I wanted to see whether I could, without any prior research or study in the field, nor prior knowledge of such, somehow devise a method of telling the time using the sun. Now why would any sane person wearing a watch on his wrist do this? Well for one, to see what it might have felt like before we had such conveniences as the wrist watch, and for two, to show that with a little thought and some basic knowledge, man is quite a formidable thinker! Passing this knowledge and experience on to you will serve the purpose of aligning your thoughts more with nature and to show you that you can do extraordinary things?”if only?”you start thinking a little.