For my elementary linear programming subject, the students (who are all pre-service teachers) use Excel and its Solver as the computational tool of choice. We do this for several reasons: Excel is software with which they're likely to have had some experience, also it's used in schools; it also means we don't have to …

Here's an example of a coloured tetrahedron: hello <div oncontextmenu="return false;" id="viewerContext" style = "width:640px;height:470px;" design-url="tetrahedron.jscad"></div> <div id="tail" style="display: none;"> <div …

There's a celebrated elementary result which claims that: There are irrational numbers \(x\) and \(y\) for which \(x^y\) is rational. The standard proof goes like this. Now, we know that \(\sqrt{2}\) is irrational, so let's consider \(r=\sqrt{2}^\sqrt{2}\). Either \(r\) is rational, or it is not. If it is rational, …

For years I have been running a blog and other web apps on a VPS running Ubuntu 14.04 and Apache - a standard LAMP system. However, after experimenting with some apps - temporarily installing them and testing them, only to discard them, the system was becoming a total mess. Worst of all, various MySQL files were …

These are a class of root-finding methods; that is, for the numerical solution of a single nonlinear equation, developed by Alston Scott Householder in 1970. They may be considered a generalisation of the well known Newton-Raphson method (also known more simply as Newton's method) defined by \[ x\leftarrow …

The Joukowksy Transform is an elegant and simple way to create an airfoil shape. Let \(C\) be a circle in the complex plane that passes through the point \(z=1\) and encompasses the point \(z=-1\). The transform is defined as \[ \zeta=z+\frac{1}{z}. \] We can explore the transform by looking at the circles centred at …

This was a comedy sketch initially performed in the revue "Clowns in Clover" which had its first performance at the Adelphi Theatre in London on December 1, 1927. This particular sketch was written by Dion Titheradge and starred the inimitable Cicely Courtneidge as the annoyed customer Mrs Spooner. It has …

I recently came across some nice material on John Cook's blog about equations that described eggs. It turns out there are vast number of equations whose graphs are egg-shaped: that is, basically ellipse shape, but with one end "rounder" than the other. You can see lots at Jürgen Köller's Mathematische …

JSXGraph is a graphics package deveoped in Javascript, and which seems to be tailor-made for a static blog such as this. It consists of only two files: the javascript file itself, and an accompanying css file, which you can download. Alternaively you can simply link to the online files at the Javascript content …

When I was teaching the binomial theorem (or, to be more accurate, the binomial expansion) to my long-suffering students, one of them asked me if there was a trinomial theorem. Well, of course there is, although in fact expanding sums of greater than two terms is generally not classed as a theorem described by the …