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.
No, no it didn’t. To everyone who took my bet: I’ll be in touch.
Today’s silly question is “What’s going to end today?” The answer is “Autumn. Autumn is going to end today.” Anything on your mind? Preferably mathsy?
Oo, a question to answer! This one’s from Deborah. How would you solve: $\frac{1}{x-2} + \frac{1}{x} = \frac{3}{4}$ and $\frac{1}{x}+\frac{1}{2x+1}=\frac{7}{10}$? When I substitute my answer back in, I can’t get it to work out! Forgive me if my working is a bit pedestrian — I figure it’s better to …
[chimp chimp=“3”] Adrian from Adrian Beckett Maths Tutors has kindly contributed a guest post. We LOOOOOVES guest posts at Flying Colours - if you have something about Maths you want to get off your chest, do drop me an email. For a lot of people, getting a C in GCSE Maths can make a …
Adrian from Adrian Beckett Maths Tutors has kindly contributed a guest post. We LOOOOOVES guest posts at Flying Colours - if you have something about Maths you want to get off your chest, do drop me an email. For a lot of people, getting a C in GCSE Maths can make a massive difference to their …
The final installment, the big reveal: why does the ninja trick of multiplying by 77 and finding the nine’s complement work? My friend, that is an excellent question. The reason is this: $77 \times 13 = 1,001$. And it turns out, 1001ths are not all that hard to work out. (This is, in fact, just an …
The answer is eleven! The silly question was ‘how many sleeps until Isaac Newton’s birthday?’ Do you have a silly question?
I made the mistake of clicking on this link. So it is logical, is it not, that the Crystal Vortex is the Epi-Centre Heart of the Ascension on the 12-12-12. No, Mr Tyberonn, no it isn’t logical. It may be a masterclass in sciencey-sounding… I was about to say ‘bullshit’, but that’s not strong enough. …
This is the second of a three-part series about working out thirteenths. In the first part, you learned that the first step of finding thirteenths was to multiply by 77. The second part is to work out the nine’s complement of one less than your number. What’s the nine’s complement? Slight diversion: …
It’s the first Silly Questions Amnesty of December - what’s on your mind?
I’m very happy to be able to reprise my talk about the Curious Maths of Alice in Wonderland at Imagine Books on Saturday, December 15th at 1pm. Here’s the abstract: “Whatever good meanings are in the book, I’m glad to accept as the meaning of the book.” - Lewis Carroll …
If you’ve been following the Flying Colours Maths blog for any length of time, you’ll have noticed that every Monday, there’s a new Secret of the Mathematical Ninja, a quick tip or trick for coming up with a more-or-less accurate estimate of some crazy sum you might see in your A-level class. And …
I’ve always liked the number 13, perhaps because it’s got a bad reputation. However, until Matt Parker’s recent ZOMG tweet, I couldn’t do thirteenths in my head. If you asked me ‘what’s 7/13?’, I’d have screwed my face up and said “a bit more than a half.” Now I know. It’s $0.\dot53846\dot1$. Easy …
It’s St Andrew’s Day, which ought to be a day off in any sensible society. What’s on your mind? Any silly questions for me?
If you study physics or astronomy, you get to learn about stuff that’s really only just been published. If you’re a biologist or a chemist, recent discoveries form a big part of your studies. Historians consider the modern era fair game, and no English Literature course would be complete without …
If you’ve been reading the ninja secrets over the last year or so, you’ll have noticed that adjusting by percents is a big part of ninjary, but I’ve never really explained how to do it. Let me put that right. It works pretty much as you’d expect: you work out the right percentage and add it on or …
Happy Black Friday to my American friends. While you’re waiting in the queues for the shops to open, how about dropping me a silly question? Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what time Macy’s opens, but ask me one about maths!
“[In this context] Co- just means ‘opposite’ — so a co-mathematician is a machine for turning theorems into ffee.” — Miles ([twit handle=“pozorvlak”]) Matt Parker ([twit handle = “standupmaths”]) laid down a challenge on Day 1 of the MathsJam conference: he said that proof by …
0.7 doesn’t sound like a magical number — at best, it’s a relatively obscure decimal. It’s in a fairly comfortable ‘higher than average’ zone, I suppose, if you’re looking at probabilities, but… well, it’s one of the Mathematical Ninja’s favourite numbers. It comes up in two major places: $\ln(2) …
39 days left, that’s the answers to today’s silly question. But maybe you have another silly question you’d like answered? Leave a comment below and I’ll try to answer it.
“If you had an infinite number of monkeys, there’d be no room for typewriters.” — Jason Arnopp Yes, an infinite number of monkeys would eventually — in fact, before very long at all — write Shakespeare. The problem, then, is finding which of the monkey-poo-smeared manuscripts is actually the whole …
I was merrily ninjaing away in class the other day, teaching binomial expansion my favourite way, and found that one of the rows gave the slightly awful $$\frac{-5}{81} \cdot \frac{1}{256} \cdot 27$$ My student, quite understandably, reached for a calculator. And because one of the main attributes …
Thank SQA it’s Friday! As usual, that means you can use the comments thread to ask me any question you like. I’m most likely to know it if it’s maths, but no promises either way. I know other stuff, too — try me on Dylan lyrics.
_This is a guide for A-level students on how to look like you know what you’re doing. Some of it’s common sense, some of it’s arbitrary (I’m willing to argue the toss before over-ruling you). Please feel free to add ideas, suggestions and criticism as comments! If you leave your twitter handle in …