eon

Posted by tpc at December 30th, 2004

A simple but very well designed flash game. Unfortunately there is only one level. Read on for a suggestion on how to solve it.

(more…)

Posted by tpc at December 26th, 2004

Pure maths is important because

“Prove all things, hold fast that which is good”
1 Thessalonians 5:21 (King James Version)

But then the student can always counter

“Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body”
Ecclesiastes 12:12b (New International Version)

Posted by tpc at December 26th, 2004

Americans pronounce as “fie” as in “fi-nite”. Being a Greek letter, I think the correct pronounciation should be “fee”. But to be consistent, you would have to pronounce as “pee” instead of the generally accepted “pie”.

I often joke that because they are so self-centred they always emphasise the “I”, so Ikea becomes “eye-kay-a”, Iraq becomes “eye-rack” when we pronounce it as “yee-r-arc”.

Posted by tpc at December 25th, 2004

Desmond McHale’s book, Comic Section, is a real gem. Amazingly, almost all the maths jokes that I’ve read/heard can be found here. And it’s a yellow book! (Not the lewd sense, mind you.)

Here’s one which I hope to use in class someday:
A famous operatic tenor was once asked how he managed to have such a good voice despite the number of cigarettes he smoked.
“I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life,” said the singer.
“But what about the advertisement in which you claimed that a certain brand of cigarettes never irritated your throat?” protested the reporter.
“That’s because I’ve never smoked them,” smiled the singer.
[The moral for mathematicians is - before you consider a set S, check that S is not empty.]

Posted by tpc at December 23rd, 2004

Google Print is really a wonderful project, which will without a doubt aid research. But will that spell the demise of physical libraries as we know it? I hope not.

There’s something funny about browsing a library or a bookshop. Very often, you end up finding some wonderful book which you were not looking for. For example, I picked up a book called “Irresistable Integrals” yesterday, while I was looking at QA300 shelves hoping to spot a good book on vector calculus. And that delightful (so far) little book turned out to be a number theory book in disguise, and is quite related to my research.

Posted by tpc at December 11th, 2004

For those unaquainted, these are the seven problems proposed by the Clay Mathematics Institute, which carry a cool $1 million prize for anyone who managed to solve it.

I’ve just finished the book by Keith Devlin, which is a layman’s introduction to the problems, and was debating whether to write a review. But in view of excellent reviews on the web like the following, I decided not to.

I would like to highlight something Devlin wrote. He drew a nice analogy between research and mountain climbing, which struck a chord me.

Posted by tpc at December 10th, 2004

A monk starts to climb a mountain at 8:00 am and reaches the summit at noon. He spends the rest of the day and that night on the summit. The next morning he leaves the summit at 8:00 am and descends by the same route he used the day before, reaching the bottom at noon. Prove that there is time between 8:00 am and noon at which the monk was at exactly the same spot on the mountain on both days. Note that the monk can walk at different speeds, rest, or even go backward whenever he wants.

A nice problem. Source unknown.

Posted by tpc at December 5th, 2004

My current favourite quote is this one by Paul Erdös:
“A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.”

I’ve heard it long ago but never liked to quote it until recently. All that coffee have finally paid off.

Some html: ö = &#246

Posted by tpc at December 2nd, 2004

Something I just found out. In their prospectus for their IPO, the amount that google wanted to raise was $2,718,281,828.