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TAG: maths
Return to the iplane: A complex line
It’s been four years since I came up with the idea of iplanes as a way to organise the complex points on a graph, and in the intervening time I have thought about them on and off. For some reason right now I am thinking about them a lot, and I thought I would write […]
The Seven Sticks and what mathematics is
This week I provided games and puzzles at a welcome lunch for new students in the Mathematical Sciences degree programs. I had big logic puzzles and maths toys and also a list of some of my eight most favourite puzzles on tables with paper tablecloths to write on.
One of the puzzles is the Seven Sticks […]
The Number Dress-Up Party
I created the Number Dress-Up Party puzzle way back in 2017 and every so often I stumble across it again when searching Twitter for other stuff. When I stumbled across it today, I decided it was time to write it up in a blog post.
The puzzle goes like this:
The Number Dress-Up Party
All the numbers have […]
Remainders remain a puzzle
My first post of 2018 is a record of some rambling thoughts about remainders. I may or may not come to a final moral here, so consider yourself warned.
What has prompted these ramblings today was reading this excellent post by Kristin Gray about her own thoughts on division and remainders. In that post, I saw […]
65536
I have a whole suite of maths t-shirts that I made myself. One of them simply has the number 65536 on it. It’s been getting a bit of attention over the past couple of weeks, so I thought I might write about it.
65536 is my favourite power of 2. More specifically, it’s 216, which means […]
Actually, I am a maths person
I am a mathematician and a maths teacher. Therefore it is an occupational hazard that any random person who finds out what my job is will respond with “I’m not a maths person.” The most frustrating people are my own students who I am trying to tell that my actual job is to help them […]
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Holding the other parts constant: it’s everywhere!
It seems like ages ago — but it was only yesterday — that I wrote about differentiating functions with the variable in both the base and the power. Back there, I had learned that the derivative of a function like f(x)g(x) is the sum of the derivative when you pretend f(x) is constant and the […]
Where the complex points are: on a parabola
This is the third in what has turned out to be a series on Where the Complex Points Are.
Where the complex points are: introduction to the iplane concept
Where the complex points are: on a line
Where the complex points are: on a parabola (YOU ARE HERE)
Where the complex points are: the graph of a function
Where the […]
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Where the complex points are: on a line
This is the second in what has turned out to be a series on Where the Complex Points Are.
Where the complex points are: introduction to the iplane concept
Where the complex points are: on a line (YOU ARE HERE)
Where the complex points are: on a parabola
Where the complex points are: the graph of a function
Where the […]
3 Comments
Where the complex points are
When you first learn complex numbers, you find out that they give you ways to solve equations that were previously unsolvable. The classic example is the equation equation x^2 + 1 = 0, which if you’re only using real numbers has no solutions, but with complex numbers has the solutions x=i and x=-i.
As someone who […]
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