Pi appears again – a probability problem This is a nice maths problem which has a surprising result: If you take 2 randomly generated numbers between 0 and 1 (lets call them x and y), then divide y by x, what is the probability that the resultant number will round to an even number? The… Continue Reading →
Cardioids in Coffee Cups Numberphile have just done a nice video on how a cardioid shape is formed when a light is shone against the side of a mug. You can see this effect above (from the Numberphile video here). So, I decided to recreate this using Geogebra to get to understand some of the… Continue Reading →
Looking for a pre-Ice Age civilisation? An interesting thought experiment is to consider the rise of modern civilisation and to ask whether civilisations could have risen in the long distant past. Let’s look at some graphs to see the plausibility of the climatic side of this. Firstly we can see on this graph (source here)… Continue Reading →
FOBISIA Code Breaking Competition 2025 Back by popular demand – we’re going to run the FOBISIA Code Breaking Maths Challenge again. Last year we had close to 120 schools taking part with over 22,000 students completing at least one code level. We hope that this year’s event will be equally successful. The dates will be: Between… Continue Reading →
Solar Gravitational lens: Seeing alien planets Let’s say in the future we pick up a signal from Proxima Centauri b – an exoplanet which is orbiting the star Proxima Centauri around 4.2 light years away. It would be nice to jump in a spaceship to explore further – but even travelling at 61,500km/h (the speed… Continue Reading →
Plotting asteroids – will 2024 YR4 hit Earth? According to current estimates there is approximately a 1.6% chance of a collision between asteroid 2024 YR4 and Earth. This would not be an extinction level event – but could be enough to flatten a city. So I thought I’d work backwards from the calculated orbital paths… Continue Reading →
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