News: Isnt maths cool
Zooming in to see the slope
A lot of people introduce the derivative at a point as the slope of the tangent at that point, which to me is quite confusing. It seems to me that the reason we want the derivative is that it is a measure of the slope of our actual function at that point, not the slope of a completely different thing. To me, the thing is that the function itself is pretty much straight if we are close enough to it, so when we're looking really close, saying it has a slope at this point is a meaningful thing to say.
Ten years
On the 23rd of July 2008, I started my first day as coordinator of the Maths Learning Centre at the ³ÉÈË´óƬ. Today is the 23rd of July 2018 – the ten year anniversary of that first day. (Well, it was the 23rd of July when I started writing this post!)
The Human Galton Board
Last week we were booked in to do with several groups of school students, but it turned out there would be a lot fewer of them than we expected, and I didn't think Human Markov Chains would work very well with under 20 students. I still dearly wanted to do a moving maths activity, and I still wanted it to be about probability, but I wasn't sure what to do. Then, on the morning of the day the students were coming, I had an inspiration and quickly knocked together the Human Galton Board.
Human Markov Chains
This blog post is about a moving maths activity that I have wanted to do for years and finally got an opportunity to do this year in 2018. It's a model of a concept called a "Markov Chain" using human movement.
Stop hating on cis(θ)
I met with some lovely Electrical and Electronic Engineering lecturers yesterday about their various courses and how I can help their students with the maths involved. And of course complex numbers came up, because they do come up in electronics. (I have not the slightest clue how they come up, but I am aware that they do.)
Likeable primes
There is a Twitter account that tweets the prime numbers once an hour in sequence. (The handle is .) Since before I joined Twitter, it's been working its way through the six-digit primes and some of them are very nice. A lot of other people think they're nice too, based on the fact that they are given likes and retweets. But what is it that motivates people to do this? What is it that makes a prime likeable? Well, that's what this post is about.
65536
I have a whole suite of maths t-shirts that I made myself. One of them simply has the number 65536 on it. It's been getting a bit of attention over the past couple of weeks, so I thought I might write about it.
Holding the other parts constant
It seems like ages ago – but it was only yesterday – that I wrote about differentiating functions with the variable in both the base and the power. Back there, I had learned that the derivative of a function like f(x)g(x) is the sum of the derivative when you pretend f(x) is constant and the derivative when you pretend g(x) is constant.
Where the complex points are
When you first learn complex numbers, you find out that they give you ways to solve equations that were previously unsolvable. The classic example is the equation equation x^2 + 1 = 0, which if you're only using real numbers has no solutions, but with complex numbers has the solutions x=i and x=-i.
David Butler and the Prisoner of Alhazen
Once upon a time, I did a PhD in projective geometry. It was all about objects called quadrals (a word I made up) - ovals, ovoids, conics, quadrics and their cones - and the lines associated with them - tangents, secants, external lines, generator lines. During the first two years, I did talks about my PhD research, which I could not resist calling "David Butler and the Philosopher's Cone" and "David Butler and the Chamber of Secants".
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