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Category: Isn’t maths cool?

Anything about maths concepts or processes that I think is really cool.

Stop hating on cis(θ)

I met with some lovely Electrical and Electronic Engineering lecturers yesterday about their various courses and how I can help their students with the maths involved. And of course complex numbers came up, because they do come up in electronics. (I have not the slightest clue how they come up, but I am aware that […]

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Likeable primes

There is a Twitter account that tweets the prime numbers once an hour in sequence. (The handle is @_primes_.) Since before I joined Twitter, it’s been working its way through the six-digit primes and some of them are very nice. A lot of other people think they’re nice too, based on the fact that they […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Differentiating exponents: two wrongs make a right

I was talking to a student about his calculus last week. He was trying to differentiate xx. (Actually he was trying to differentiate x ln(x) and had decided the best place to start was to raise e to the power of it, thus producing xx.) At first he tried this:

I asked him what he thought […]

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Where the complex points are: where the idea came from

This is the last (for now) in a series of posts about Where the Complex Points Are. To catch you up, I discovered a way of visualising where the complex points are in relation to the points of the real plane. All the complex points (p+ri,q+si) are in a plane attached to the real plane […]

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Where the complex points are: the graph of a function

This is the fourth in 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
Where the complex points are: the graph of a function (YOU ARE HERE)
Where the complex points are: where the idea […]

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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 […]

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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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