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Posted by tpc at June 6th, 2006

I was browsing through an American study guide and it recommended remembering the order of arithmetic operations through this mnemonic:

PEMDAS (Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally) -
Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction.

Locally, I learnt and teach kids this:
BODMAS -
Brackets, Order, Division, Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction.

According to this wiki page, this is the UK way.

Another interesting one is
SOHCAHTOA - for the three trigonometric functions.
Locally, we teach students to remember “Toa Cah Soh” which in a local dialect actually means Big Feet Aunty.

Posted by tpc at June 4th, 2006

If I ever win the national lottery, (Probability = 0 because I don’t play.) I’d spent US$600 and buy this table.

Posted by tpc at June 4th, 2006

I read about Diana Eng who is now supposedly a poster girl for geekness, infusing technology and of course mathematics into the fashion world. It’s pretty interesting.

You can read about her at her blog (you’ll be redirected.) Read the post titled “What I said at WYSIWYG” for a nice resume. On her Feb 1, 2006 post, she mentioned using the Fibonacci sequence to design the fringe of her knit jacket. But nothing was explained.

If you have 10 mins to spare, you can watch on youtube a video of a fashion show of the work of Eng and Emily Albinski. At about the 7th min, there is a Mobius strip bag. They cleverly created a zip down the middle of the strap, so that you can double the length. Still pictures here.

Her portfolio.

Posted by tpc at June 1st, 2006

When you are based in a small Asian country, you get precious little opportunities to hear good lectures from distinguished lecturers. Luckily, there is an increasing trend of video-casts available on certain websites. The silly thing is that even when the video is available, I cannot find time to sit down and watch it.

One of the few I’ve watched:
Ben Green’s talk on Arithmetic Progressions of Primes.

A series I intend to watch someday:
Alf van der Poorten - Topics in Number Theory
Conway, Silverman and Weeks - Young Mathematician Conference