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.
Dealing with the R sin alpha nonsense that comes up in C3 is the kind of thing our arch-nemesis, the mathematical pirate, would grumble about constantly. They’d claim it wasn’t really trigonometry, or just that it was too hard, or a complete misuse of the word ‘arr’. The mathematical ninja, on the …
“How many Keystone cops can fit in a silly circus car?” “Not silly enough!” It’s Friday. It’s Silly Questions Amnesty. Bring on the dancing clowns… I mean, silly questions. I’ll be glad to answer them.
 Today is my birthday, by the way1! Amazon vouchers, …
Or, how the biggest company in the world is built on matrices. As with most Flying Colours Maths Blog articles, I don’t claim any kind of historical accuracy. The details are likely to be wrong, but I’m not one to let the truth get in the way of the story; all the same, feel free to correct anything …
The gravitational constant, as has been drilled into your head repeatedly, is 9.8 metres per second squared. It’s usually easiest to do all your sums with a $g$ in (I find it better to write $12g$ rather than 117.6, especially when the $g$s all cancel out) — but sometimes, you just want to show off. …
Crikey, where did October go? That’s an example of a Silly Question, on which I’m currently having an amnesty, because it’s Friday and that’s when I hold a Silly Questions Amnesty. Send me questions. I’ll answer them.
Pure mathematics, may it never be of any use to anyone. - HJS Smith
When Barney lent me this book, he asked me if I could explain what topology was for. In honesty? Despite my thesis title being “The Magnetic Topology Of The Solar Corona”, I couldn’t — I only studied topology because my PhD boss told me I should. I hoped that reading Euler’s Gem (from the bookmark I …
Nicolas Bourbaki published a series of books in the middle of the 20th century, in an attempt to put maths on a firmly rigorous footing. So far, so completely antithetical to Mathematical Ninjary, which is all about getting good answers quickly without worrying too much about the details. But …
You know the drill by now, surely? It’s Friday. Send me questions. You can drop me an email at colin@flyingcoloursmaths.co.uk if you’d rather not leave it in the comments.
It is magic until you understand it, and it is mathematics thereafter - Bharati Krishna
(Thanks to Barney Maunder-Taylor for teasing me with this one.) This question interests me for two reasons: Firstly, it’s a neat proof in its own right, and I’ll start by giving a little sketch of it. Secondly, though, even after Barney gave me the crux of the proof, it still took me an …
So why do some angles give you exact answers and some not? I’m not going to answer that today. Another time. Today, I’m just going to tell you how to remember the key values, the ones that live on your set square. You can make an argument that the sine and cosine of any whole number of …
Happy Friday! What’s on your mind today? Anything I can help with? Any questions about maths… or anything else?
[caption id=“attachment_1038” align=“alignright” width=“640”] Nicely discovered a flaw in the Pentium chip in 1994.[/caption]
When I was a student, there was a holy trinity of popular maths authors: Douglas R Hofstadter, Martin Gardner, and Ian Stewart. Those were the bad old days, before geekery was cool – no Festival of the Spoken Nerd, no Marcus du Sautoy1, no MathsJam… back then, good maths books were …
This is a fairly specific trick, but it comes up often enough that you can dazzle people once in a while by multiplying numbers that are close together. You need to know how to square numbers (check back to this series of posts). Here’s the trick: say you need to work out $57 \times 63$. …
It’s Friday, so it’s SQA day. It’s 5/10, which simplifies to… well, ask if you don’t know! I promise to be nice, and I’ll turn it into a blog post if I can!
Ooh, a rare out-of-sequence snippet! I’m thrilled to announce I’ll be talking at the Wimborne Literary Festival on “Uglification and Derision: the curious maths of Alice in Wonderland”. More details will follow. Meanwhile, one of the nice things about having a ‘B’ …
A reader, concerned for a friend sitting GCSE, asks: A friend of mine needs to pass GCSE maths for his uni course and is struggling – any tips on books/sites? He’s just failed the Foundation so he’s now going for the Higher as the score needed for a C is lower. First up: way to go! …
“Oh,” says the student, “I’ll just put it in my calculator.” I fold my arms. “$\sin\left(\frac{\pi}{6}\right) = 0.00914$!” he says, confidently. I sigh. “Oh!” he continues, brightly, “is it meant to be in radians? I don’t like …
Got something that’s bugging you about maths? Post it below for a no-names-no-packdrill reply. It doesn’t matter how silly. If you’re worried about a train leaving Manchester at 8am, let me know.
Hello, It is good to receive tips and articles from FlyingColoursMaths in email. Well, I have been a learner in maths. You seem to be very well educated in maths and have a lot of good ideas about learning or teaching basic maths. May I ask you a few questions in maths? I’m interested in …
Some while ago, I covered how to convert degrees into radians (and vice versa) in your head. I missed a trick, though: I didn’t tell you about the exact values, which would probably have been a bit more useful. By definition, a circle – 360º – is 2π radians, which (hopefully …
Got something that’s bugging you about maths? Post it below for and the silly questions amnesty fairies will give you a no-names-no-packdrill reply. It doesn’t matter how silly. If you struggle to get to the end of the 2-4-6-8 chant, let me know.
First up, a horrible confession: I like teaching the higher-lever core maths modules (C3 and C4), because they’re closer to ‘real’ maths than the AS-level ones. One of the things that sets them apart is the introduction of proofs, usually for trigonometry1. And a lot of students …
First up, a horrible confession: I like teaching the higher-lever core maths modules (C3 and C4), because they’re closer to ‘real’ maths than the AS-level ones. One of the things that sets them apart is the introduction of proofs, usually for trigonometry1. And a lot of students …