Classical Geometry Puzzle: Finding the Radius This is another look at a puzzle from Mind Your Decisions. The problem is to find the radius of the following circle: We are told that line AD and BC are perpendicular and the lengths of some parts of chords, but not much more! First I’ll look at my […]
Further investigation of the Mordell Equation This post carries on from the previous post on the Mordell Equation – so make sure you read that one first – otherwise this may not make much sense. The man pictured above (cite: Wikipedia) is Louis Mordell who studied the equations we are looking at today (and which […]
The Mordell Equation [Fermat’s proof] Let’s have a look at a special case of the Mordell Equation, which looks at the difference between an integer cube and an integer square. In this case we want to find all the integers x,y such that the difference between the cube and the square gives 2. These sorts […]
Can you solve Oxford University’s Interview Question? The excellent Youtube channel Mind Your Decisions is a gold mine for potential IB maths exploration topics. I’m going to follow through my own approach to problem posed in the video. The problem is to be able to trace the movement of the midpoint of a ladder as […]
Using Maths to model the spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) This coronavirus is the latest virus to warrant global fears over a disease pandemic. Throughout history we have seen pandemic diseases such as the Black Death in Middle Ages Europe and the Spanish Flu at the beginning of the 20th century. More recently we have seen […]
Square Triangular Numbers Square triangular numbers are numbers which are both square numbers and also triangular numbers – i.e they can be arranged in a square or a triangle. The picture above (source: wikipedia) shows that 36 is both a square number and also a triangular number. The question is how many other square triangular […]
