It’s going to be a quick one today as it’s Friday and I’m shattered! I’ve just got in from work and I’m desperately trying to get this out of the way before my OH finishes work and starts demanding my attention. I’m taking my inspiration from a comment from @marcusbelben on my post about spherical and hyperbolic …
Inspired by a question from the UKMT Intermediate challenge (2016); read the original blog post here. Clock image credit: https://openclipart.org/detail/217064/2-oclock Fermat image public domain, available https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36804
Fermat’s Christmas Theorem Read More »
Today my Year 10s did the Intermediate Maths Challenge. I thought I’d have a go too, but only got as far as Q3 before finding something I wanted to investigate further. The question concerned the sums of pairs of consecutive square numbers – 1² + 2², 2² + 3² … up to 5² + 6², …
I thought Christmas was over…? Read More »
I had a great conversation with my Year 10 set when doing geometric reasoning a couple of weeks ago – they’d done it all before, so we whizzed all the shape and angle properties in about twenty minutes, but I constructed one from the other, much as Euclid built up his ideas in the Elements. …
Why angles in a triangle aren’t always 180 Read More »
While I was reading stuff for yesterday’s post on Egyptian fractions, the name Sierpiński popped up a couple of times – and as his triangle is one of my favourite bits of maths, I thought I’d run with that thread for today’s post. Polish mathematician Wacław Sierpiński has three fractals named after him: the aforementioned triangle, …
Curves, carpets and sponges – a look at Sierpinski Read More »