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Monthly Archives: August 2020

Where the complex points are: on a real circle

Introduction
In 2016 I created the iplane idea, which allows you to locate the complex points on a real graph.
In case you haven’t heard of it or you need reminding, the idea is that at every real point (p,q) of the real plane, there is a planes-worth of complex points attached, all of which have coordinates […]

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The memory of His Royal Highness

Once upon a time, I met a His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent.
The story of how that happened was pretty cool from my perspective, but every so often I wonder about it from his perspective. The Duke is the patron of the Royal Institution of Australia, and was in Australia just as they were […]

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Twelve matchsticks: focus or funnel

One of my favourite puzzles is the Twelve Matchsticks puzzle. It goes like this:
Twelve matchsticks can be laid on the table to produce a variety of shapes. If the length of a matchstick is 1 unit, then the area of each shape can be found in square units. For example, these shapes have areas 6, […]

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Quarter the Cross: Colouring

Quarter the Cross is one of my favourite activities of all time, whether in maths or just life. I learned about it way back in 2015 and have been mildly or very obsessed with it ever since. You can read about my obsession in my first Quarter the Cross blog post, and you can read […]

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Roosters don’t lay p-values

I’ve just started teaching an online course, and one module is a very very introductory statistics module. There are a couple of moments when we ask the students to describe how they interpret some hypothesis tests and p-values, and a couple of the students have written very lengthy responses describing all the factors that weren’t […]

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Twitter and how not to treat my students

I have learned a lot from Twitter about how to treat my students, and most of it has been through being treated in ways I do not like. Recently I have been searching my own tweets to find things I’ve said before, and as I’ve dipped into old conversations, several unpleasant feelings have resurfaced when […]

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Which Number Where

Last year I invented a game called Digit DisguisesĀ and it has become a regular feature at One Hundred Factorial and other events. But before Digit Disguises came along, there was another game with a similar style of interaction that we played regularly, and this blog post is about that game. The game is called “Which […]

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