ALG 17

She was just seventeen, You know what I mean, And the way she looked Was way beyond compare. How could I dance with another? Oooh! When I saw her standing there.
One of the great early Beatles tracks. With ALG 17, we're standing on the number line and seeing how our position is related to multiples, especially multiples of 2 and 3.
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MONDAY: Where do multiples of 3 occur on the number line? How can we tell whether a multiple of 3 is also a multiple of 6? And of 9??

TUESDAY: This is a classic task that I was introduced to by Lulu Healy. You might want to generate some data and look for patterns, but it is also perfectly accessible via a generic (analytic) approach by thinking about the occurance of multiples in strings of consecutive numbers.

 WEDNESDAY: more multiple fun....

This task keeps catching me out! One moment I think it's OK, the next I think I've got it wrong and it doesn't work!
Part b) can be solved by simply going through the multiples of 7 and 8 in the standard times tables, which leads us to 63, 64. However, a key feature here is the relation of these numbers to 56 (= 7×8) .... Or one can make use of 'the difference of two squares': 8×8 is a multiple of 8, 8×8 – 1  = (8–1)(8+1) is a multiple of 7. [This generalises very nicely, eg to finding consecutive numbers that are multiples of 19 and 20 respectively.]
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THURSDAY: A classic 'think of a number ....' task. The task has links with Tuesday's version of ALG 17 and one can get quite a long way by using an empirical, data-generating approach. However, its attraction lies in the fact that one can use some fairly routine algebra to throw light on the underlying structure. [This is all the more noteworthy, given that we often use algebra to ease our path to an answer while ignoring structure!]

Note: I came across this particular task in a 1995 paper by Alan Bell (Purpose in school algebra, JMB, 14, 41-73). Sadly, Alan died this year. (9 April 1929 - 5 April 2018)
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FRIDAY: We take an explicit look at the structure of Thursday's task.

Here the geometric and/or symbolic representation may help us see that Thursday's task results in the product of the 'outer two' of three consecutive numbers. When the middle number is odd, the outer numbers will be even so both must be a multiple of 2 and one must also be a multiple of 4 (of course, they can be multiples of other numbers too). So their product is a multiple of 8.