WHAT’S THE POINT OF INTEGRATION BY SUBSTITUTION?
A PUZZLE: which of these shapes is larger: a square of side 7cm or a circle or diameter 8cm? Well that’s easy to answer if you know that the area of a circle is $A=\pi
Barney Maunder-Taylor
TOP TEN SAMPLING METHODS
A quick reminder: if there are 1200 students at our school, it would be very time-consuming (if not impossible) to interview them all for your Sociology project. Here the population is everyone at the school,
PRODUCT OF PRIME FACTORS – A CALCULATOR SHORTCUT!
Expressing a positive integer (whole number) as the product of prime factors is a bit like dismantling a machine to see what it’s made of. Let’s try it with 26390. Drawing a Prime Factor Tree
WHAT IS THE “AVERAGE” IN MATHS?
An average is simply a way of picking out a typical value from a set of objects (usually numbers). There are infinitely many different ways to pick a “typical value”, but here are some of
HOW MANY SQUARES ARE THERE IN THIS GRID?
Before we see the quickest way to answer the question (scroll down if you are an expert!), let’s see some different possible approaches: GCSE APPROACH: There are 16 little squares.There is the one large square
Regression: lines (and planes) of best fit.
Let’s suppose we have some data for height and weight of some adult humans. We suspect the weight depends on the height – so taller people tend to weigh more than shorter. How can we
What does “MATH ERROR” mean?
SHORT ANSWER: this means you have just asked the calculator to do a sum it doesn’t like. The three most common reasons for getting this error message are: 1) you have tried to divide by
WHAT’S ZERO TIMES BY INFINITY?
SHORT ANSWER: 0 x ∞ = anything you like! Intrigued? Read on… LONG ANSWER: the question seems absurd: after all, zero multiplied by anything is zero, yet any multiple of infinity is always infinity. But
THE GREATEST MISTAKE IN THE HISTORY OF MATHS:
This must surely be the exclusion of women from maths for most of our history, due to mathematics (and academia in general) being seen as an unsuitable activity or as simply “too hard” for women.
USING MATHS TO CHECK WORLD RECORD ATTEMPTS: PETE’S DIABOLO HIGH THROW
My friend Pete can throw a diabolo ridiculously high – check out this video of him in action! Pete thinks his throw is higher than the “official” world record of 23.92metres so asked me if