Monthly Archives: March 2005

Petals Around The Rose

A link to this game resurfaced at a local forum. I remembered it took me a while to solve it, one or two years back. Basically I carefully read through this story about Bill Gates and constructed the formula that … Continue reading

Posted in Fun Stuff | 3 Comments

Graphing Calculators

I had been putting off writing about this until I found this post. I have yet to read it, and will do so after finishing my post, to compare the differences. The Ministry of Education in Singapore will be introducing … Continue reading

Posted in Teaching | 2 Comments

Dangerous Living Room

One headline of the local newspaper reads “Living Room is the Most Dangerous Place for Kids”. In the report, they quoted a study which showed that 30% of accidents involving children occurred in the living room. This is a classic … Continue reading

Cranks

in mathematics does not refer to eccentric old men (although there are many around) but refer to certain statistics related to partitions. The name probably came about because there is a related notion of ranks of partitions. This article in … Continue reading

Posted in Combinatorics, Number Theory | 1 Comment

The Computer

The word originally did not refer to a machine but rather the person who worked the machine, yes those ladies at Bletchly Park. The following is an interesting passage extracted from A History of Pi. To return to Johann Martin … Continue reading

A typical mathematical joke: What is the value of $\pi$? Highschool Teacher: 22/7 exactly. Engineer: 3.14 , which is 22/7 to 2 decimal place. Physicist: 3.14 , to 3 significant figures. Statistician: I’m 95% confident that it is 3.14. Medical … Continue reading