Posted by tpc at March 27th, 2005
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 gave the right answer everytime. But I never found out why the name of the game was important until today.
Please play the game before reading on.
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Posted by tpc at March 25th, 2005
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 graphing calculators into the new A level syllabus. This is bad. Let me stress that I’m not a stick-in-the-mud techno-phobe. In fact, I make heavy use of Maple for my work, and believe in using computers for computations. But I certaintly feel that unleashing high powered calculators to students do more harm than good. I have seen students who can’t add two-digit numbers without calculators. Giving them calculators that can graph and do algebra would be akin to giving a chain-saw to kids who still can’t hold a knife. Simmons share similar views and wrote in the preface of his book of seeing students who instead of factoring 
, or some other similar quadratic, use calculators to graph and solve the equation.
The biggest benefactors are not the students but Texas Instruments. Do you know that they fly teachers and no doubt MOE officials, to conferences in Australia and other places, so that they can see and hear other people rave about TI calculators? The seed money has paid off handsomely, since TI can now ship 20,000 units of calculators every year to Singapore.
Posted by tpc at March 23rd, 2005
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 case of sensational reporting and abuse of statistics. There is a really simple reason why most accidents occur in the living room - children spend more (active) time there. So what are we to make of the report? Overreact and ban our children from the living room? From now on, the kids are confined to the staircase because the report showed there are 10 times less accidents at staircases than in the living room.
Posted by tpc at March 23rd, 2005
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 New Scientist reports some sort of breakthrough. I’m not sure how significant it is, but it is significant enough that Mahlburg’s site is currently the first result if you google “cranks, partition”. I would like to take a look at the paper.
Posted by tpc at March 12th, 2005
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 Zacharias Dase. He was born in 1840 in Hamburg … all who knew him agree that except for calculating and numbers, he was quite dull … His extraordinary calculating powers were timed by renowned mathematicians: He multiplied two 8-digit numbers in his head in 54 seconds; two 20-digit numbers in 6 minutes; two 40-digit numbers in 40 minutes; and two 100-digit numbers (also in his head!) in 8 hours and 45 minutes. To achieve feats like these, he must have had a photographic memory … He calculated the natural logarithms of the first 1,005,000 numbers, each to 7 decimal places, which he did in his spare time … he compiled a table of hyperbolic functions, again in his spare time. He also offered to make tables of the factors of all numbers from 7,000,000 to 10,000,000; and on the recommendation of Gauss, the Hamburg Academy of Sciences agreed to assist him so that he could devote himself to this work, but he died in 1861, after he had finished about half of it.
It would thus appear that Carl Friedrich Gauss, who holds so many firsts in all branches of mathematics, was also the first to introduce payment for computer time.
Posted by tpc at March 5th, 2005
A typical mathematical joke:
What is the value of 
?
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 Student: 3.1415926535 , I memorised it!
Mathematician: The value of is .
Heisenberg: 3.14159 , but I’m uncertain
Einstein: 3 relative to your frame of reference.
Leibniz: 4(1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + … ).
Cookie Monster: Pie? Me no like pie, me like cookie.
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