Prime Spirals – Patterns in Primes One of the fundamental goals of pure mathematicians is gaining a deeper understanding of the distribution of prime numbers – hence why the Riemann Hypothesis is one of the great unsolved problems in number theory and has a $1 million prize for anyone who can solve it. Prime numbers […]
Getting a 7 in IB Maths Exploration Coursework I’ve teamed up with Udemy – the world’s leading provider of online courses to create a comprehensive online guide to the exploration. It includes 9 tutorial videos of essential information designed to ensure you get the best possible grade. You will also get a 60 page pdf […]
Anscombe’s Quartet was devised by the statistician Francis Anscombe to illustrate how important it was to not just rely on statistical measures when analyzing data. To do this he created 4 data sets which would produce nearly identical statistical measures. The scatter graphs above generated by the Python code here. Statistical measures 1) Mean of […]
Hailstone Numbers Hailstone numbers are created by the following rules: if n is even: divide by 2 if n is odd: times by 3 and add 1 We can then generate a sequence from any starting number. For example, starting with 10: 10, 5, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1, 4, 2, 1… we can see […]
Chaos and strange Attractors: Henon’s map Henon’s map was created in the 1970s to explore chaotic systems. The general form is created by the iterative formula: The classic case is when a = 1.4 and b = 0.3 i.e: To see how points are generated, let’s choose a point near the origin. If we take […]
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 […]
