Witness Numbers: Finding Primes The Numberphile video above is an excellent introduction to primality tests – where we conduct a test to determine if a number is prime or not. Finding and understanding about prime numbers is an integral part of number theory. I’m going to go through some examples when we take the number […]
Maths Games and Markov Chains This post carries on from the previous one on Markov chains – be sure to read that first if this is a new topic. The image above is of the Russian mathematician Andrey Markov [public domain picture from here] who was the first mathematician to work in this field (in […]
New Paper 3s for Applications! I’ve just finished making six Paper 3 practice papers for HL students sitting the Applications examination. The Paper 3 pack is 41 pages and includes over 180 marks of questions and full typed up markscheme. I’ve paid close attention to the IB’s provided examples for the course to make sure […]
Life on the Beach with Markov Chains Markov chains are exceptionally useful tools for calculating probabilities – and are used in fields such as economics, biology, gambling, computing (such as Google’s search algorithm), marketing and many more. They can be used when we have the probability of a future event dependent on a current event. […]
My colleague has just made a fantastic set of video tutorials for the SL Applications syllabus. So far he’s made over 60 videos – with more to come! I really like the on screen use of the GDC and clear examples given. Very useful for Applications students. Playlist 1 (Number and Algebra) Playlist 2 (Functions) […]
Spotting fake data with Benford’s Law In the current digital age it’s never been easier to fake data – and so it’s never been more important to have tools to detect data that has been faked. Benford’s Law is an extremely useful way of testing data – because when people fake data they tend to […]
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