Sphere packing problem: Pyramid design Sphere packing problems are a maths problems which have been considered over many centuries – they concern the optimal way of packing spheres so that the wasted space is minimised. You can achieve an average packing density of around 74% when you stack many spheres together, but today I want to […]
Martingale II and Currency Trading We can use computer coding to explore game strategies and also to help understand the underlying probability distribution functions. Let’s start with a simple game where we toss a coin 4 times, stake 1 counter each toss and always call heads. This would give us a binomial distribution with […]
Time dependent gravity and cosmology! In our universe we have a gravitational constant – i.e gravity is not dependent on time. If gravity changed with respect to time then the gravitational force exerted by the Sun on Earth would lessen (or increase) over time with all other factors remaining the same. Interestingly time-dependent gravity was […]
The Tusi couple – A circle rolling inside a circle Numberphile have done a nice video where they discuss some beautiful examples of trigonometry and circular motion and where they present the result shown above: a circle rolling within a circle, with the individual points on the small circle showing linear motion along the diameters […]
The IB Maths Exploration Guide and the IB Maths Modelling and Statistics Exploration Guide are suitable for all IB students. They are both written by an IB teacher with an MSc. in Mathematics, 10 years experience teaching IB Standard and Higher Level and who has worked as an IB examiner. Resource Number 1 […]
The Martingale system The Martingale system was first used in France in 1700s gambling halls and remains used today in some trading strategies. I’ll look at some of the mathematical ideas behind this and why it has remained popular over several centuries despite having a long term expected return of zero. The scenario You […]
