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.
As you might know (if you’ve spotted the big yellow bar above), I’m training for the Berlin Marathon in memory of my grandmother (you can support me - and the Alzheimer’s Society - by sponsoring me here). One of the perks of marathon training is that I get to eat all sorts of …
The population of Iceland is somewhere around 300,000. It’s not an incredibly big island, and there’s not a huge amount of immigration and emigration - which means, if you’re on the Icelandic dating scene, you have to be fairly careful not to go out with uncomfortably close …
The Mathematical Ninja looked offended. For once, it wasn’t a student that was the guilty party, it was me. “You’re considering a series on the WHAT?!” “The binomial expansion,” I said, brightly. “Drivel!” said the Mathematical Ninja “Drivel, …
In this episode, [twit handle = “reflectivemaths”] (who is Dave Gale in real life) and I talk about… Comments on our last episode Weinstein-gate: full coverage via [twit handle = “peterrowlett”] (Peter Rowlett in real life) at the Aperiodical A boy called Tutankhamun: …
A question from my Uncle Bill, who’s one of my great heroes and a philosopher of some standing: How does one get from 1 to 2 other than saying by diktat that 2 is the name we give to 1+1? Now, I’m far from the world’s greatest expert on the philosophy of number. The purer you get …
“Yuk,” said the student, faced with $(x+y+z)^2$. FOIL doesn’t work." The Mathematical Ninja thought carefully before speaking: on the one hand, FOIL was a cheap tactic with a single use, but on the other, the student hadn’t said $x^2 + y^2 + z^2$, which would have meant …
Mathematics: A Novel by Jacques Roubaud has a lot in common with my degree. It seemed to go on forever without any particular point, was incomprehensible in large chunks, and ended with a nagging sensation that it ought to have been first class. Oh, and it was a cross between dull pedantry, …
It’s a sunny Saturday1, and two maths items have caught my eye. Firstly, a bit of a cock-up on the sums front from Andover Tesco (via [twit handle=“reeveshall”]): Eight grand for a kilo of blueberries? That can’t be right. It’s hard to figure out what they’ve done …
The Silly Questions Amnesty is going on hiatus for the summer. You can still leave comments here if there’s anything you’d like me to answer - depending on how the Mathematical Ninja’s holidays pan out, SQA might be back in September. We’ll see!
Ever since I’ve been teaching GCSE maths, I’ve struggled to explain one topic more than any other: how to find a centre of rotation. There are several ways students approach this problem. There’s the “I dunno” way, sometimes disguised as “I dunno where to start.” This is the kind of comment that …
“I stayed in ALL DAY waiting for that delivery of exam papers in Amsterdam,” said the Mathematical Ninja. “I could have been out pillaging, but no, sodding Yodel told me the package was out for delivery and it was only when I called them up for the eighth time they admitted …
Getting to the end of exams, now. Any last-minute silly questions?
These are my barely-edited, initial thoughts on today’s controversial EdExcel Core 3 paper. Nothing is meant as an attack on anyone - except, of course, for Mr Gove, who must be used to it by now. UPDATED June 14: The legendary Arsey at TSR has worked solutions for the paper here. There were a …
“Fancy a Bob Marley doughnut?” asked Constable Gale. I sighed. “And that’s a doughnut…” “Wi’ jam in.” It’s a delicate line to draw, with Gale’s jokes: laugh too little, and you won’t get a doughnut. Laugh too much and he’ll tell …
$f(x)$, it turned out, was $x^2 \tan(x)$. “That’s going to be a pain to differentiate,” said the student, sighing. Taylor series were not his favourite; differentiating trig functions just made matters worse. “I have a trick,” said the Mathematical Ninja. “Will it …
Want a silly answer? You know what to do.
When I was about 12, and my brother about 10, one of us1 threw a lump of coal at the other. The coal ricocheted around our living room and smashed an ornament. In the subsequent inquest, both of us tried to blame the other, as brothers do; he reasoned, perversely, that I had thrown it, so it was my …
“$\arccos\left(\frac{1}{3}\right)$”, said the student, absent-mindedly. The Mathematical Ninja, without thinking, said “$1.23$.” “It says $70.5$ here… but, but,” said the student, realising that the Mathematical Ninja was not going to accept answer like that, …
It’s an odd day today - and also palindromic 31/5/13. Assuming you write the date that way around, of course. Any questions? Anything on your mind? Just give me a shout below and I’ll get back to you with as good an answer as I can!
It’s the awkward third episode! In which… @sr_cav (who is Cav in real life) is nice about us on his blog Dave meets Art Benjamin Art Benjamin’s TED talks about mathemagic and statistics Rüdiger Gamm’s mental arithmetic Secrets of the mathematical ninja Colin invites you to …
A reader asks: how do I figure out the volume of soil I need to fill a flowerpot? A flowerpot is a slightly peculiar shape: it’s not a cone, it’s not a cylinder, it’s somewhere between the two. Luckily, we have a word for such shapes: it’s a frustum of a cone. The easiest …
[caption id=“attachment_2821” align=“alignright” width=“228”] ca. 1850 by H. Lentall[/caption] A Mathematical Ninja? Surely Nightingale was just a nurse? Wandering about with a lamp? Well, no. For several reasons, no. First up: there’s no such thing as …
Roll on summer! Only a month or so until I can take a well-earned break. Meanwhile, I’m still on duty if you have questions - just drop me a message in the comments below!
This came up in class, and took me several attempts, so I thought I’d share it. The question asks about an ellipse with equation $9x^2 + 25y^2 = 225$, with foci $A$ and $B$ at $(\pm4,0)$ - the challenge is to prove that the normal to the ellipse at a point $P$ bisects the angle $APB$. …
While writing an obituary for George Box, I stumbled on something I thought was ingenious: a method for generating independent pairs of numbers drawn from the normal distribution. I’ll concede: that’s not necessarily something that makes the average reader-in-the-street stop in their …
The only stupid question (apparently) is the one you don’t ask. So, the question you leave in the comments is clearly not a stupid one. It might even provide me with ideas for a post later on :o)
When you get to the co-ordinate geometry bit of C1, suddenly the equation of a line changes from $y = mx + c$ to $ (y-y_0) = m(x - x_0)$. It doesn’t really change - it’s just another way of writing the same thing; especially when you’re dealing with a fractional gradient, this is a …
It wasn’t a big grocery run - in those days, I was a single bloke, living alone; a loaf of bread, a frozen pizza, a jar of coffee… “Dinner,” as I called it. Oh and a few Lindt balls. You know them - the little chocolate balls you get at Christmas, with some sort of tasty …
Surely you know the drill by now? You provide the questions. I provide the answers. All of it in the comments section below.
“THIS.” spat the Mathematical Ninja, “IS. THE. WORST. ARTICLE. I’VE. EVER. SEEN.” It’s a bad sign when the Mathematical Ninja starts talking in single-word sentences. I handed him an espresso. “What’s wrong with it?” I asked. “I’ve …