Ring Them Bells, Part II

We're looking at and listening to bells this week. Here's my Paolo Soleri bell:



Surprisingly, my clip art collection, which we use as raw material for the math curriculum, has 418 different bell illustrations. Of course after scanning them all, I found the list includes bell peppers too. Here are a few types of bells:

Besides the large hanging bells, there are hand bells, cow bells, dinner bells (triangles), tubular bells (long pipes) and the desk counter bell (ding ding) and jingle bells. Not shown here are the doorbell, alarm bell, and the bell gong.

I have also omitted the following which we associate with the word bell:

• pepper
• hop
• jar
• -y dancer
• Alexander Graham
• helmets
• curve
• Tinker
• helicopter
• Salvation Army
• Packard
• diving
• Taco
• telephone
• & Howell
• sleigh

The bell works on math principles we'll talk about later. In the meantime, you can go this website and learn all about how bells and chimes are made, repaired and maintained. See if you can find out how Russian bells differ from European bells.

The art of making and ringing bells is called campanology. There is a field of mathematics called Braid Theory that addresses ringing sets of bells. (We don't teach that in Excel Math, sorry.)

See if you can define these two common sayings:  For whom the bell tolls   and   That rings a bell