Mathematics Problem Videos

Via Teaching College Math, I discovered Math TV, which provides videos of worked-through high school level mathematics problems.

There are two sites: MathTV, which has problems presented by a couple of different people, and a YouTube site, which contains a lot more problems, all of which seem to be presented by the same guy.

That's OK, because I think he does the best job, anyway.

Unfortunately, they've disabled embedding, but click on the image for a nice example of integration by substitution ... although I think the last one could have been explained more simply than by using polynomial long-division!

All up, a nice resource.

Dear Oh Dear Oh Dear

Thanks to Teaching College Math for this wonderful cover of that great tranny show standard, I Will Survive ...

G.H. Hardy Redux

I was amused to read this post on Walking Randomly ...

"I am just about to go into hospital to have my wisdom teeth removed under general anesthetic, but before I go I thought I would mention that I have discovered an elementary proof of the Riemann Hypothesis and will share it with you all as soon as I get back."

Presumably, this is a humourous allusion to G.H. Hardy when he undertook what, to his mind, was a perilous trip across the English Channel, and mailed postcards to a number of friends, saying he had such a proof.

Hardy was a staunch atheist, and figured that, if he was wrong and there truly was an omniscient being, they'd never let him get away with leaving the world thinking he had found a solution to such a famous problem and taken it with him to Davy Jones' locker :-).

My best wishes for a successful operation and a complete recovery!

Oh Dear!

I think this video will do for mathematics what the third Reich did for group showers :-).

Apparently, it's a parody of a song called "Fergilicious" by Fergie. If this is any indication of how good that song is, I'll be giving it a very wide berth!

Wow!

I find it amazing that this guy can solve a 7x7x7 Rubik's Cube at all, let alone in just six and a half minutes!

Thanks to Mathematics Under The Microscope for the pointer.

Silly Maths Jokes

I've seen most of these before ... you may have to pause the video in places, to read them ... but a good many are still funny.

The soundtrack, on the other hand, made me feel somewhat ill.

Thanks(?) to Let's play maths for this one.

Yes ... I Am A Nerd

Before we go any further, I guess I should admit just how much of a geek I really am ...

All of my computers have been named after mathematicians: the Windows box is Gauss, the iMac is Mac Lane, the MacBook is Noether, my old PowerBook was Euler and my original iBook was Euclid.

Not being one to mess with tradition, I've christened the young, slim and clever MacBook Air "Tao", in honour of Terence Tao, who I mentioned yesterday.

I was tempted to balance out the sexes a little, by naming it Kovalevskaya, but I just couldn't handle the thought of having to ping such a long host name ... plus Terry was on my mind due to his lecture.

Maybe next time, Sofia.

The Prime Directive

As you know, gentle reader, in recent weeks, I have started listening to podcasts, rather than the radio, while performing my ablutions.

Well, I just happened to have run out of podcasts today, so I listened to Adam Spencer's breakfast program, instead.

I'm absolutely certain that the drying up of my river of podcasts was no random occurrence! No, it was the result of the universe conspiring to ensure that I heard Adam interviewing mathematician Terence Tao, Australia's only winner of the Fields Medal.

While Terry didn't have anything much of interest to say this morning, the interview alerted me to the fact that he's giving a public lecture tomorrow evening at my alma mater, the University of Sydney.

It's entitled "Structure and Randomness in the Prime Numbers", so it sounds like we may get to hear at least a soupçon regarding his work with Ben Green which culminated in the Green-Tao Theorem, that the sequence of prime numbers contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions.

See Mathworld for a short explanation of what that means.

The New York Times ran a nice, quite approachable article on Tao, covering his history and work back in March of 2007.

Finally, here's a short video about him. Annoyingly, it resizes your browser, so right click and open it in a separate window.

Hearing about the lecture has almost ... but not quite ... overshadowed the impending arrival of my MacBook Air :-).

Turning A Sphere Inside Out ...

... without breaking it!

I don't pretend to really understand this, but it's pretty impressive.

Mathemagic

While I understand that what this guy (Arthur Benjamin) does is mainly just a feat of memory, it's still damned impressive.

The most interesting part is the last few minutes, where he squares a five digit number, while thinking out loud, so you can see the algorithm he employs ... basically it's (a+b)^2 = a^2 + b^2 + 2ab, with some word mnemonics (ie, a peg system) to reduce the amount he has to remember.

Even if you're not into such geekery, you may enjoy the entire video, because he's not a bad showman.

Thanks to Spluch for the link.

Happy Bah Humbug

Well, the madness is almost over, thank goodness!

I doubt anyone will be reading this blog today, so more than likely this will be the only entry I bother making.

My favourite mathematical physicist, John Baez, has given us a little Bah Humbug gift, in the form of a post about some of the many free mathematics and physics texts available online.

As usual for one of his This Week's Finds In Mathematical Physics articles, the content starts out elementary and becomes increasingly complex as you proceed, so there are books in there for all levels.

Enjoy the rest of your day. Hopefully, the enormous lunch you've had won't make you feel bilious for too much longer :-).

The Master Of Us All

During a chat with my good friend Carsten, he mentioned Project Euler, titled after the famous mathematician of the same name, Leonard Euler.

It's a site that provides a set of mathematical problems that one can attack either via pure thought or by writing some code.

For each problem, there is a forum page where people can discuss their approach and any code they wrote to solve it.

I plan to have a go at as many of them as I can handle. Even just thinking about a problem and reading other people's approaches should be a great learning exercise.

Greg Egan Short Story

Reading John Baez's website reminded me that I hadn't checked out The n-Category Cafe for a while, so I added its RSS feed to Google Reader, to avoid that happening again.

Browsing through the articles, I found one that mentioned a short story by Greg Egan. I'm not sure whether it's new, or simply been re-published recently, but I figured I might as well point you to it, in any case.

The title is Steve Fever. You may need to click "skip intro" to see the article.

I've not read it yet, but according to John ... "It’s about an artificial intelligence so stupid it believes what it reads on the internet."