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.
“So that’s 0.9332 times 500,” said the student. Dubiously: “In your head?” “466.6,” said the Mathematical Ninja, before the student could reach for his calculator. “Whoa,” said the student, some seconds later, once he’d tapped in the sum …
Mayday! Mayday! It’s Mayday on Monday. Leave your mathematical distress calls in the comments below and I’ll arrange a mathematical lifeboat for you.
It’s a new month, which means it must be time for a new episode of Wrong, But Useful! This time around, we talked about queuing at EuroDisney, how to play Battleships, why Peppa Pig’s dad has a quadratic equation in his office, 110%, elliptic curves and Dave’s brilliant new game. …
The DATA method is probably the coolest acronym I’ve ever come up with - it’s even about graphs! It’s a four-point plan for how to sketch a graph and be pretty sure of getting the salient features right. D is for domain The first thing to decide is, where is the function …
I caught a bit of the Chancellor’s budget speech recently. I try to avoid doing silly things like that, it just makes me angry. However, I was interested to find I was hearing big numbers bandied about without really knowing what was big in the context of a national budget. So I wondered how I …
That’ll be the last SQA in April, that will. Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?
My podcast co-host Dave Gale asked an interesting question: why is the volume of a pyramid $V=\frac{1}{3}x^2h$? Dave being Dave, he doesn’t want to mess around with 3D geometry, so I figured I should find an explanation a smart GCSE student would be able to grasp. I’m going to start with …
The Mathematical Ninja took one look at the list of the 10 coolest numbers and scoffed. “Those,” he said, “are not the ten coolest numbers.” “What are, then?” said the student. “Remember, nothing for cultural significance, so you can’t have 42. And no …
Roll up, roll up! Well, that’s my lunch ready. Now, how about some silly questions for pudding?
Imagine you go to the casino with $100 in one-dollar chips and decide to play the roulette wheel. You’ve nothing better to do; you can stay there as long as you have chips left. How long can you expect to carry on playing? Let’s pick on the 50-50 bets (such as red or black, odd or even), …
My colleague Adrian has submitted a guest post in the form of a video explaining how to answer a typical QTS mental arithmetic question on percentages. Adrian? Take it away. Or rather, divide it and multiply it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUj1gAuPDIs
Beep! Sorry, Colin’s not in right now. If you have a question he can answer when he gets back, please leave it after the beep. Beep!
Problems worthy of attack/ Prove their worth by fighting back - Anon, often quoted by Erdos. A few weeks ago, James bloody Grime posted a question on logarithms that I had a creditable stab at answering. My first answer, it turned out, was wrong. I corrected it, and wrote up my second answer, and …
The student, wisely, stammered an apology and the Mathematical Ninja pulled him back in through the window by the ankle. “But I just…” “Shht.” “I mean…” “Shht.” The Mathematical Ninja took a step towards the student and the student, finally shhted1. …
On 30th June, 1987, the Canadian mint introduced the new $1 coin, or ’loonie’, and Patrick Sjöberg of Sweden set a new high jump world record of 2.42 metres (only 3cm short of the current world record). Footballers Lionel Messi and Samir Nasri were less than a week old, and Sebastian …
A quick, one-off masterclass in how to put things into brackets today - six methods of factorising you need to know to do well at GCSE maths. (1) Common number $3a + 6$ two terms (letter and number, no squares) you can divide them both by 3 $3 \times a = 3a$ $3 \times 2 = 6$ $3a + b = 3(a + 2)$ Try …
I have no particular view on the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands. Or rather, I get so muddled up between my distaste for colonialism and the right of self-determination that I don’t know what to think. In any case, I was interested by the recent referendum results in which the results were …
39,916,801 has just been discovered to be the largest prime number. $11$ is a positive integer such that $11! + 1$ is prime; let $n = 11!$. Now, $n+2$ is clearly a multiple of 2, $n+3$ is a multiple of 3 and so on up to $2n$. Applying a similar argument accounts for all the numbers between $2n$ and …
Questions? Anybody?
What’s this? Multimedia? Whatever next? What you are about to click is an audio extravaganza: a mathematical conversation between me and Dave Gale, who is @reflectivemaths on twitter. It’s the first episode of Wrong, But Useful. Mentioned in this podcast: The Maths/Maths podcast (with …
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers is one of very few library books I’ve ever failed to return on time. There’s a certain poetry to it: it’s a biography of Paul Erdős, one of the 20th century’s more important mathematicians, and certainly the most prolific. Yesterday would have …
The student blinked, and the Mathematical Ninja had covered the board in a colourful diagram. “It’s easy,” said the Mathematical Ninja, “to work out the fractions of pi in each quadrant - once you know a few rules.” The student automatically reached for a pen. Whenever …
What’s on your mind this week? Any burning questions you think I can answer? Just leave them in the comments below.
“How is it,” asked my friend Jo, “that five of my friends are celebrating birthdays today?” This is, although it might not seem it, closely related to reading the minds of Alex Bellos’s parents. By which I mean: randomness doesn’t always look random. From here on …
I’m writing this fresh from giving a talk at Poole Grammar School about the maths of Alice in Wonderland and didn’t get a real chance there to talk about one of the ninjas behind it. János Bolyai is my favourite kind of mathematician: the glorious failure. He came really close to being …
Another Friday, another SQA. It’s the Ides of March today - what do you need to beware of?
* Thanks to Barney Maunder-Taylor for the problem In Alex’s Adventures In Numberland, the author - Alex Bellos - makes a big production of getting one of his parents to pretend to toss a coin 20 times and the other to actually do it, then tell which one is which. His secret1 ? People …
The sun is setting outside the dojo. The Mathematical Ninja’s student knows this, for he is looking out of the window. At some point, he notices the compass point a fraction of a centimetre from his eyeball. “Pay attention,” says the Mathematical Ninja. “What does this add up …
Come on now, hand over any silly questions you might have. No names, no pack-drill!
There are some problems that trouble so many people for so long that they become ‘classics’. Things like Fermat’s Last Theorem (which lasted 350-odd years without a proof), how to factorise big numbers (still waiting) and proving the parallel postulate from the other Euclidean …