Sometime in May 1936, Alan Turing sighed with satisfaction as he finished his paper “On Computable Numbers”, which is now famous as the start of computer science (though the first electronic computer was not built until 1943). Take a deep breath. How likely is it that you inhale an atom which was also in Turing’s sigh? Continue reading
Sharif Quansah, Mugisha Uwiragiye, and Hamse Adam all got this at least mostly right.
A maths teacher has 30 students in her class, and 30 chairs in the classroom. How many possible seating plans does she have? Continue reading
The website i-want-to-study-engineering.org/ bills itself as “A website to help you compete for engineering places at top universities”.
It is a collection (with answers) of problems you might be set at a university interview. Apart from their value in interview preparation, the problems are also interesting. Continue reading
Click here. Thanks to my daughter Daisy for passing this on. It’s actually not true that you have to be a genius to understand Riemann surfaces, but the transcript reads a bit garbled. Continue reading
The new Hollywood blockbuster film about the mathematician Alan Turing is well-made, covers an interesting true story, and is shaped to promote some valid and important ideas. Continue reading
In FP1 we study how to get two more roots of a cubic equation if we are given one in advance. But life is not always so generous. How do we solve a cubic if we’re given no root in advance? Continue reading
A curve, or a function, or a range of values of a variable, is discrete if it has gaps in it – it jumps from one value to another. In practice in S2 discrete variables are variables which only have whole-number values, like number of heads when you toss a coin, or number of goals in a football season. Continue reading
