The Barnsley Fern: Mathematical Art This pattern of a fern pictured above was generated by a simple iterative program designed by mathematician Michael Barnsely. I downloaded the Python code from the excellent Tutorialspoint and then modified it slightly to run on repl.it. What we are seeing is the result of 40,000 individual points – each plotted […]
Galileo’s Inclined Planes This post is based on the maths and ideas of Hahn’s Calculus in Context – which is probably the best mathematics book I’ve read in 20 years of studying and teaching mathematics. Highly recommended for both students and teachers! Hahn talks us though the mathematics, experiments and thought process of Galileo as […]
Finding focus with Archimedes This post is based on the maths and ideas of Hahn’s Calculus in Context – which is probably the best mathematics book I’ve read in 20 years of studying and teaching mathematics. Highly recommended for both students and teachers! Hard as it is to imagine now, for most of the history […]
Finding the average distance between 2 points on a hypercube This is the natural extension from this previous post which looked at the average distance of 2 randomly chosen points in a square – this time let’s explore the average distance in n dimensions. I’m going to investigate what dimensional hypercube is required to have an […]
Find the average distance between 2 points on a square This is another excellent mathematical puzzle from the MindYourDecisions youtube channel. I like to try these without looking at the answer – and then to see how far I get. This one is pretty difficult (and the actual solution exceptionally difficult!) The problem is to […]
Generating e through probability and hypercubes This is a really beautiful solution to an interesting probability problem posed by fellow IB teacher Daniel Hwang, for which I’ve outlined a method for solving suggested by Ferenc Beleznay. The problem is as follows: On average, how many random real numbers from 0 to 1 (inclusive) are required […]
