Follow Your Passion in Math

Grow your passion by motivating practice like the 11-year-old Math Marvel

“Chess is a mathematical poem” – Aarushi Maheshwari 

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Interesting Maths Facts

 

• Notches (cuts or indentation) on animal bones prove that humans have been doing mathematics since around 30,000 BC.
• Ancient Greeks used little rocks to represent numbers. The name of Calculus means pebbles in Greek.
• The = sign (“equals sign”) was invented by 16th Century Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde, who was fed up with writing “is equal to” in his equations.
• The word hundred is derived from the word “hundrath”, which actually means 120 and not 100.
• Zero (0) is the only number which cannot be represented by Roman numerals.
• Many Chinese hospitals do not have a 4th floor  because the words four in Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin and Korean (shi, sei, si, sa) sound the same as the words in those languages for death.
• Forty is the only number with letters in alphabetical order, while one is the only one with letters in reverse order.
• The number 5 is pronounced as ‘Ha‘ in Thai language. 555 is also used by some as slang for ‘HaHaHa’.
• Zero is an even number. Mathematicians remember it. Many people take longer to decide whether it is even or odd.

Mathematical Beauty

e^iπ + 1 = 0

Euler’s identity is often cited as an example of deep mathematical beauty.

Constance Reid: Euler’s identity is “the most famous formula in all mathematics”.

Euler’s Identity is a special case of his formula from complex analysis suggested by Swiss mathematician Euler in  1748.

The identity links five fundamental mathematical constants:

• The number 0
• The number 1
• The number π (π = 3.141 . . .)
• The number e (e = 2.718 . . .)
• The number i, the imaginary unit of the complex numbers.

Euler’s Identity “is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don’t know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth”. – Benjamin Peirce.

17 Best Puzzles of 2017

 

Aplusclcik team chose 17 Best Puzzles of 2017.

They are:

What country has the lowest birth rate in the World?

If certain words in this question are spelt wrong, how many of the eighteen words are spelt wrong?

A claustrophobic gentleman chooses his place in the train that will enter a tunnel just after the station. Where is the best place for him?

Read more at

17 Best Aplusclick Puzzles of 2017 from Igor Kokcharov, Ph.D, PMP

We Lack Numeracy Skills

Alan Smith reported amazing statistics of adult numeracy:

2011 England Survey: 49 of 100 adults lacked of numeracy Level 1 skills (fractions, percentage, and decimals).  The figure is only shocking for 51% of population.

OECD reported (PIAACX2012) that forty percent of USA young people aged 16-19 were below Level 2.

This is statistics. Statistics is a part of mathematics and it is about us as a group.

There are two categories of people who can and who cannot do numbers.

Are You in a category of people who are comfortable with numbers? Check / train yourself at the website A+Click

The Great Explainer Richard Feynman

How to explain the most complex ideas in simple terms?

Four steps of the Feynman technique are

1. Write down everything new you learn about a subject in a notebook.
2. Pretend to teach the topic in a classroom. Try to explain in a simple way.
3. Go back to the books when you get stuck.
4. Simplify and use analogies that everybody knows and understands.

 

“There is no better way to learn than to teach.” – Benjamin Whichcote

The Largest Known Prime Number

The largest known prime number was discovered in 2016 by a computer laboratory of the University of Central Missouri .

2^57,885,161 – 1

is one of the Mersenne primes that can be written in form 2ⁿ – 1, where n is an integer.  They are named after 17-century French mathematician Marin Mersenne.

The number written in the decimal form contains 17 million digits.