Wednesday, October 15, 2014

39 Ways to Love Math

1. Love patterns. Love the hunt. Love that our thirst for patterns is so deep and instinctual that you might call it canine.

2. Love the underground tunnels connecting mathematics. Love that each topic in math is a subterranean river of insight, nourishing lands it scarcely seems to touch.
3. Love the explosion of brain.
4. Love the way math brings out the inner teenager in a professor.
5. Love the way math brings out the inner professor in a teenager.
6. Love in-jokes. Love the fact that when you say “I’m a math major,” your classmates might scream, unprompted, “THE LIMIT DOES NOT EXIST!”
7-8. Love families. Love categories of diverse objects, all sharing the same property. Love graph theory.
9. Love physics. Love that math helps us grasp the world, not just with our fingers, but with our thoughts.
10. Love math’s bigness. Love that there’s always more math out there.
11. Love that math can happen anytime, anywhere. Love that it’s an art project of the mind, and your easel is always handy.
12. Love clarity. Love precision. Love the total absence of BS.
13-15. Love visualization. Love the proofs without the words.
16. Love silliness.
17. Love the journey. Love the dead ends, obstacles, and wrong turns—and love reaching the destination, finally.
18. Love biology, astronomy, language, music—and love that math that underlies them all.
19. Love symbols. Love the mystic poetry of numbers, letters and those other, funnier markings interspersed among them.
20-21. Love playing. Love that math gives us an excuse to play.
22. Love the ineffable.
23. Love insight. Love how the world changes, comes awake, comes alive, when you use math to understand it.
24. Love camaraderie. Love meetings of the minds.
25. Love the divine. Love the long tradition of seeing the patterns of mathematics as the fingerprints of something greater than us.
26. Love beauty. Love that math is a uniquely human pursuit.
27. Love the challenge. Love the way it pushes your mind.
28. Love simplicity. Love the clean divide between true and false.
29. Love adventure. Love the great unknown.
30. Love your thesis. Love things you discovered. Love rectangular tilings yielding planar binary trees.
31. Love squares being circles (under the right metric, of course). Love math turning your intuition inside out.
32. Love Fibonacci. Love music. Love quarter-notes separated by Fibonacci rests.
33. Love that it keeps your dad employed, and gives you an excuse to draw a “mathemakitten.”
34-35. Love a chance to use the Greek alphabet, without joining a frat.
36. Love that math creates reality, in more ways that one.
37-39. Love that math means 6,000 different things to 6,000 different people.

http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2014/01/22/39-ways-to-love-math/

Math Cool Facts

    • What comes after a million, billion and trillion? A quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, nonillion, decillion and undecillion.
    • The number 5 is pronounced as 'Ha' in Thai language.555 is also used by some as slang for 'HaHaHa'.
    • Different names for the number 0 include zero, nought, naught, nil, zilch and zip.
    • Zero ( 0 ) is the only number which can not be represented by Roman numerals.
    • The name 'zero' derives from the Arabic word sifr which also gave us the English word 'cipher' meaning 'a secret way of writing' .
    • Do you know the magic of no. nine (9)? Multiply any number with nine (9 ) and then sum all individual digits of the result (product) to make it single digit, the sum of all these individual digits would always be nine (9).
    • Here is an interesting trick to check divisibility of any number by number 3.A number is divisible by three if the sum of its digits is divisible by three (3).
    • The = sign ("equals sign") was invented by 16th Century Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde, who was fed up with writing "is equal to" in his equations.
    • Googol (meaning & origin of Google brand ) is the term used for a number 1 followed by 100 zeros and that it was used by a nine-year old, Milton Sirotta, in 1940.
    • The name of the popular search engine ‘Google’ came from a misspelling of the word ‘googol’.
    • Abacus is considered the origin of the calculator.
    • Have you ever noticed that the opposite sides a die always add up to seven (7).
    • 12,345,678,987,654,321 is the product of 111,111,111 x 111,111,111. Notice the sequence of the numbers 1 to 9 and back to 1.
    • Plus (+) and Minus (-) sign symbols were used as early as 1489 A.D.
    • An icosagon is a shape with 20 sides.
    • Trigonometry is the study of the relationship between the angles of triangles and their sides.
    • If you add up the numbers 1-100 consecutively (1+2+3+4+5...) the total is 5050.
    • 2 and 5 are the only primes that end in 2 or 5.
    • From 0 to 1,000, the letter "A" only appears in 1,000 ("one thousand").
    • A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
    • 'FOUR' is the only number in the English language that is spelt with the same number of letters as the number itself
    • 40 when written "forty" is the only number with letters in alphabetical order, while "one" is the only one with letters in reverse order.
    • In a group of 23 people, at least two have the same birthday with the probability greater than 1/2 .
    • If there are 50 students in a class then it's virtually certain that two will share the same birthday..
    • Among all shapes with the same perimeter a circle has the largest area.
    • Among all shapes with the same area circle has the shortest perimeter .
    • In 1995 in Taipei, citizens were allowed to remove ‘4’ from street numbers because it sounded like ‘death’ in Chinese. Many Chinese hospitals do not have a 4th floor.
    • The word "FRACTION" derives from the Latin " fractio - to break".
    • In working out mathematical equations, the Greek mathematician ,Pythagoreans used little rocks to represent numbers.Hence the name of Calculus was born which means pebbles in Greek.
    • In many cultures no 13 is considered unlucky, well,there are many myths around it .One is that In some ancient European religions, there were 12 good gods and one evil god; the evil god was called the 13th god.Other is superstition goes back to the Last Supper. There were 13 people at the meal, including Jesus Christ, and Judas was thought to be the 13th guest.
    • Have you heard about Fibonacci? It is the sequence of numbers wherein a number is the result of adding the two numbers before it! Here is an example: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so on
    • Want to remember the value of Pi (3.1415926) in easy way ? You can do it by counting each word's letters in 'May I have a large container of coffee?'
    • Have you heard about a Palindrome Number? It is a number that reads the same backwards and forward, e.g. 12421.
      • The word 'mathematics' comes from the Greek máthēma, which means learning, study, science.
      • Do you know a word known as Dyscalculia? Dyscalculia means difficulty in learning arithmetic, such as difficulty in understanding numbers, and learning maths facts!
      • Do you know ‘Mathematics’ is an anagram of ‘me asthmatic’ (An Anagram is word or phrase made by transposing or rearranging letter of other words or phrase.
      http://www.makemegenius.com/cool-facts/maths-interesting-and-amazing-facts

How to Plot Points in the Cartesian Plane

When you were trying to find your street on that map, you went over to D and then down to 12. And that "D12" designation was unambiguous, because it was easy to tell which stood for which. Even if the designation had been written as "12-D", you still would have known which box to go to, because the "D" would still have been across the top and the "12" would still have been along the side. But in the Cartesian plane, both axes are labelled with numbers. How can you tell how far left or right to go, or how far up or down to go?


Suppose you were told to locate "(5, 2)" (pronounced as "the point five two" or just "five two") on the plane. Where would you look? To understand the meaning of "(5, 2)", you have to know the following rule: The x-coordinate (the number for the x-axis) always comes first. The first number (the first coordinate) is always on the horizontal axis. 

So, for the point (5, 2), you would start at the "origin", the spot where the axes cross:start at the origin...
...then count over to "five" on the x-axis:...count over five...
...then count up to "two", moving parallel to the y-axis:...then count up two...
...and then draw in the dot:...and then draw the dot.
Finding the location of (5, 2) and then drawing its dot is called "plotting the point (5, 2)".

When plotting, remember that the first number is for the horizontal axis and the second number is for the vertical axis. You always go "so far over or back" and then "so far up or down".
  • Plot the point (4, –5).
I will start at the origin:Start at the origin...
...then I'll count over four units on the horizontal x-axis:...count over four...
...then I'll count down five units paralell to the y-axis:...count DOWN five...
...and then I'll draw my dot:...and draw the dot.
As you can see above, a negative y-coordinate means that you'll be counting down the y-axis, not up.
  • Plot the point (–3, –1).   Copyright © Elizabeth Stapel 2000-2011 All Rights Reserved
I'll start at the origin:Start at the origin...
...then I'll count backwards three units along the x-axis:...count BACKWARDS by three...
...then I'll count down one unit parallel to the y-axis:...count DOWN by one...
...and then I'll draw my dot:...and draw the dot.

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/plane2.htm