How did it happen? We missed Pi Day – 03/14 or 3.14 aka March 14th, which is the day that we all (except us on this blog) celebrate this famous value in Mathematics. Check out this video from CNN; Click on the image to play the video
A senior maths class I taught recently were looking at Inflation and how this factor affects compound interest. For example, you might invest $100 dollars at 10% compounding interest over 10 years. How much would your total be? Now, you might expect a healthy profit but your new found wealth might be severely influenced by […]
A “shard” or “sherd” is part of a piece of pottery that might be found at an archaeological site where pottery-making people once lived. Archaeologists usually want to figure out how big the original piece of pottery was, as that can tell them something about who might have made the piece and when it was […]
Designers have come up with a radical new double-wing design which is more fuel efficient and has less of a sonic boom than previous designs. Click on the image for more information on this breakthrough.
Wasn’t Toy Story 3 the coolest family film of the year? According to When Will I Use Math? an Animator uses linear algebra to show the way that an object is rotated and shifted and made larger and smaller. As well as prized jobs at Disney and Pixar, animators can work in computer and console game development, […]
Just for fun a group of friends make a circle of shopping trolleys around their friend’s car – no, don’t try this! Then one of them suggests that it would be better to have the trolleys another metre away from the car (to prevent scratches). Two questions they had to figure out: 1. How much […]
Standard Deviation is the square root of the variance (previous post). There are two slightly different formulae. We use the this one only if all values we are using form the complete population. That is, each score (x or s – Greek “sigma”) must be the total number of scores; However, if we instead use a random sample, drawn […]
The two targets in the previous blog lead us to discuss the idea of how far each shot is from the centre – something that mathematicians call Variance. It is really a measure of the distance each score is from the mean (average – or, in our case the bullseye). When all the distances are […]
Have a look at the two data sets below – the results of two target practices. You will notice that they have different patterns but both score the same number of points (ignore the -ve and + ve areas). Which target do you think shows the most accurate shooting – on the left or on […]
