# Category Archives: Technology

Pak’s history of the Catalan numbers mentioned an Ngram chart. But perhaps because I wasn’t reading carefully or possibly due to the fact that I was reading the print copy and did not access url pointing to the said chart, … Continue reading

## “Gods” make Comeback at Toyota

is the headline of this bloomberg piece that reports the strange phenomena that human beings are replacing robots in the manufacturing lines. The point is that by automating some of these production process, much of the skill learnt by the … Continue reading

## The beauty of number theory

The realization that she is posing a problem, or working on one, that Zeno or Euler could have posed might stimulate in a student an aesthetic motivation much more profound than the purported motivation factor associated with the “real-life” problems … Continue reading

Another report on how students don’t learn as well when they attempt to multi-task.

## How Not To Excel

Apparently a couple of influential papers — by two world famous economists Reinhart and Rogoff from Harvard — that were quoted by politicians to shape policies contain serious errors that invalidated their claims. They made the common mistake of not … Continue reading

## According to Socrates

… it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know … Continue reading

## Can computers write proofs

that human being can understand? By that I mean not those formal logic nonsense. Tim Gowers is doing an interesting experiment to get readers to judge proofs of exercises in metric space theory. The three proofs are supposed to be … Continue reading

## Fake curves

Interesting post on how a supposed trig function is actually not trig. I have to admit I used to do things like this and use the arc tool (on powerpoint) to create curves that only look vaguely like the actual … Continue reading

## 4 clicks to Mathematics

I learn this game from watching Tim Chartier’s video. (The original game was 5 clicks to Jesus but in this age of religious sensitivity … ) So this is the game, go to Wikipedia and click random article on the … Continue reading

## MOOC

stands for Massive Online Open Course. Not exactly a very recent concept since some universities have already been making their courses online for years. The “novel” bit perhaps lie in universities or institutions going out to woo international audiences, even … Continue reading

## My infallible calculator

A student came to me today and asked if there was something wrong with my notes because I claimed that $\sin x \ge 0$ for $x \in [2k\pi, (2k+1)\pi]$. The reason that I was wrong was that … Continue reading

WolframAlpha now allows you to do analytics on your facebook account. I’m most keen on the friends network portion and just couldn’t resist trying it out. I don’t have many facebook friends but it was very interesting that they were … Continue reading

## Turing Doodle

I was supposed to wake up early before my two year old boy so that I could get some work done, but alas, I got distracted by the neat little Turing machine puzzle put up by the guys at google. … Continue reading

Posted in Fun Stuff, Number Theory, Quotes/People, Technology | 4 Comments

## QRcodes and smartphones

Had a good laugh today reading about Justinsomnia syndrome. (via this rant about qr codes via JD Cook’s tweet.) For me QR-codes are great because they are mysterious (at first) and students find them interesting. And I’m saying this after … Continue reading

I’m one of those who first reaction is to “google it” when I want to check some fact. I even had a first generation SSD netbook which boots up in less than one minute to allow me to check things … Continue reading

## gnuplot with PGF/tikz

One downside about writing calculus lecture notes has always been drawing graphs. They just take up too much time. What I used to do was to use whatever software at my disposal (usually powerpoint) and created jpeg to embed into … Continue reading

Posted in Calculus/Analysis, General, Technology | 1 Comment

## I heart* my TI-84

my department (a.k.a academic group) loaned me a TI-84 Plus Silver Edition because students here are all supposed to be equipped with one. I just love how I’m learning new mathematics everyday with the TI-84. For example, 1) Andrew Wiles … Continue reading

## Printed vs E-books

A blog post by Nicolas Carr. I personally belong to the majority who like the convenience of e-books but almost always prefer printed books (and research papers) for reading. I’ve moved to my new office for about a month and … Continue reading

Intrigued by the following very pretty combinatorial identity attributed to R.C. Lyness. $\sum_{r=0}^n \binom{n}{r} \binom{p}{s+r} \binom{q+r}{m+n} = \sum_{r=0}^n \binom{n}{r} \binom{q}{m+r} \binom{p+r}{s+n}$ Note how it interchanges p with q and m with s. Not much information on this person is … Continue reading