The Flying Colours Maths blog has been running posts twice weekly since 2012, covering maths from the basics to… well, the most advanced stuff I have a clue about.
Here they all are, sorted by date. Some day, other ways to filter them will be possible.
In honour of @teakayb’s birthday this week, here’s a post with a vaguely Douglas-Adams-related theme. The student looked at the Mathematical Ninja and decided this was a moment where reaching for the calculator would be appropriate. “$\frac{29}{42}$…” she said aloud. …
At a recent MathsJam, there was a puzzle. This is nothing out of the ordinary. It went something like: If an absent-minded professor takes his umbrella into a classroom, there’s a probability of $\frac{1}{4}$ that he’ll absent-mindedly leave it there. One day, he sets off with his …
Once upon a time, there was a Scrabble tournament. Sixteen of the county’s greatest Scrabbleologists descended on the venue… only to find the organiser had lost the fixture list. What the organise could remember was this: there were five rounds, and each player played each of the others …
“Where the hell have you been?” asked the student. The Mathematical Ninja raised an eyebrow into his well-tanned forehead. That, he didn’t say, would be telling. The student sighed and sketched out a triangle. “I know that doesn’t look like 2º,” she said, to …
Hey! By the time this goes live, I’ll be in Germany, making final preparations to run the 40th BMW Berlin Marathon. I’ve been in training for the last six months, and who knows? Maybe I’ll make it all the way around the 42,000 metre course. Mo Farah, eat your heart out! I’m …
It’s an awfully short episode of Wrong, But Useful, in which [twit handle = ‘reflectivemaths’] and I discuss: Colin’s upcoming marathon efforts, which you can support by clicking here - bonus points for mathematically interesting sponsorships! Dave’s son Reuben had his …
I believe the version of this book I borrowed from the library may not be the most recent edition; it has been published under at least three different titles. As far as it goes, Beating the Odds: The Hidden Mathematics of Sport is great. It’s a terrific starting point for anyone wondering how …
“There’s more than one way to do it.” - Perl programming motto One of my few regrets about writing maths books is that I usually only get to show one way of doing things - and that gives the impression that I believe Method X is absolutely, no questions, the best method of doing …
A guest post, today, from someone who’s almost as angry as the Mathematical Ninja. Bletchley Park’s Education Officer Tom Briggs is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it any more. I’m not a maths teacher any more1 but I still find myself having those same old …
There’s a classic maths puzzle that goes something like this: Two trains start 20 miles apart, and travel towards each other at 10 miles per hour. Just as they start, a fly takes off from the front of one train, flies at 15mph directly to the other, turns around, flies back to the …
I was writing a sort of revision sheet the other day, and I’d written the questions in a sensible order, but wanted to shuffle them randomly so that students wouldn’t know what’s coming next. This is not the kind of thing Microsoft Word was built for. I decided to start a list with …
Unusually for a Mathematical Ninja, Billy Beane isn’t a mathematician. Nor is he dead. He’s a baseball manager. Now, I don’t know one end of a baseball stick from another, so this will be strewn with errors: one thing I do know, thought, is that if I was a baseball fielder, those …
“Yarr!” said the Mathematical Pirate, chopping his way through the piles of papers strewn around the classroom. The student looked unimpressed. “How do you differentiate $y = \sec^2(3x)$?” she asked. The Mathematical Ninja would have discerned that she’d just read the …
This is one of my least-favourite questions about maths. It’s a question on the level of “Is Mo Farah the world’s greatest athlete ever?” - to some people, the answer is clearly yes, and to others, just as clearly no (Bubka? Beamon? Lewis? Gebrselassie1 ?) and there’s …
The end of August is upon us… is it really Episode 6 already? Apparently so. This month, @reflectivemaths (Dave Gale) and I talk about… My talk in Edinburgh and the Maths Inspiration people Abuse of pie charts: East Lancs and the TES have things mixed up, and graphs you don’t see …
A few weeks ago, the Mathematical Ninja revealed that they integrated trigonometric functions using a cheap mnemonic. As reader Joshua Zucker pointed out, this was most unlike the Mathematical Ninja. Had they been kidnapped? Surely not; no Ninja would ever be taken alive. Had the Mathematical Pirate …
“Graffiti?” said Gale. “We don’t do mindless vandalism.” “It’s not mindless vandalism,” I said, “it looks like it’s been pretty carefully thought out.” I brought the picture up on screen. Someone had covered a suspiciously …
A reader asks: “When you’re working out an expression, why do you sometimes divide after you multiply, when the BIDMAS rules say D comes before M?” This is exactly the reason I don’t like BIDMAS - because it suggests something that simply isn’t true (that division is …
A reader asks: “When you’re working out an expression, why do you sometimes divide after you multiply, when the BIDMAS rules say D comes before M?” This is exactly the reason I don’t like BIDMAS - because it suggests something that simply isn’t true (that division is …
It’s been a while since I did a Ninja Lives post - let me put that right! Gerolamo Cardano is just what the MacTutor archives call him: in France, he’s Jerome Cardan; if you ask a Latinist, he’s Hieronymus Cardanus. Some people call him Geronimo, which is a pretty awesome name, …
I picked up The Theory That Would Not Die by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne on a whim, a rare dead-tree impulse purchase. And I’m awfully glad I did. Bayes’s Theorem is something you tinker around in S1 - it’s the stuff with the $|$ symbol in, about absorbing information you already know …
I’m not doing a proper blog post today because it’s the summer and I’m a lazy sod. Instead, I’m going to point you towards Edinburgh, where I’ll be on Thursday to give a talk about probability to the Edinburgh Skeptics. It will mention Stigler’s Law of Eponymy …
A reader asks: how do you do the chain rule? The chain rule was always my least favourite of the differentiation rules - although the quotient rule has now replaced it as an unnecessary evil. I suspect I didn’t like it when I learnt it because I learnt it more or less by rote rather than by …
The Mathematical Ninja pointed out of the window. “I CAN SEE MY CAR MAKING SMOKE!”, he yelled. The student looked out of the window, said “Oh no!” and then, after a pause. “Hang on, you don’t have a car.” The Mathematical Ninja smiled. “Correct. But …
In which [twit handle = “icecolbeveridge”] (Colin Beveridge in real life) defends the word ‘geek’ and [twit handle = “reflectivemaths”] (Dave Gale to his offline friends) frequents the bars of Iceland. With Mrs Gale, obviously. Show notes Colin’s giving a …
A fifth - in musical terms - is really three-halves, and if you go through twelve fifths, you end up seven octaves higher. Wait, I’m starting all wrong. A musical note has a frequency - the number of times the sound wave it produces vibrates each second. Middle C, for example, has a frequency …
The Mathematical Ninja twiddled absent-mindedly with the nunchaku they used as a stress toy. “Do you use SUVAT?” asked the student, timidly. The Mathematical Ninja shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose that’s one way.” He giggled. “I don’t know the SUVAT equations, …
So, there I was, idly figuring out one of Barney’s fiendish puzzles (“How many pairs of dice would you have to throw to be 95% certain of seven being the modal total?”) when I started thinking about the binomial expansion (don’t tell the Mathematical Ninja!) You know it: if …
“You simply multiply by eight-fifths,” said the Mathematical Ninja, as if that was the end of it. The student looked hurt. “In my head?” He knew how to multiply by fractions, but much preferred writing things down. Fair enough, I thought. I interrupted, in the way the …
I LOVE index cards. When I lived in the US, I would routinely make a trip to the bookstore just to pick up more index cards, the better to process my ideas. It’s much less intimidating to look at a blank index card than it is to look at a blank sheet of paper, and there’s a limit to how …