Mathematics Weblog
New Mersenne Prime
Monday 31 May 2004 at 2:32 pm | In Articles | Post CommentIt’s not often that one can report mathematics news but two weeks ago a new Mersenne prime was discovered. A Mersenne prime is a prime number of the form ie one less than a power of two. It is easy to show that itself must also be prime. The new prime number is has 7,235,733 decimal digits and was found on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 computer running Windows XP.
You can help search for larger primes and possibly win $100,000 for discovering the first 10-million-digit prime. See the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS)
LaTeX
Sunday 30 May 2004 at 1:18 pm | In Articles | Post Commentis a very powerful language and allows one to type very nice mathematics in a way that would be difficult to do any other way. It is what provides the mathematics on this site. How else could one show
But will do more than that and also provide graphics. See the diagram in Monday 10 May or how about these:
go on – spot the deliberate error 😕 |
or
See here for a good tutorial on graphics
Two Interesting Functions
Sunday 23 May 2004 at 10:33 am | In Articles | 2 CommentsAt A level students only see reasonably nice functions, though occasionally they come across
where the maximum is smaller than the minimum (which, incidentally, is why one should use the terms local maximum and local minimum instead).
But what they won’t have come across are functions like these:
When trying to draw the graphs remember that
- between every pair of irrational numbers there is a rational number
- between every pair of rational numbers there is a irrational number
You can very roughly draw f using dots and there’s a nice picture of g at mathworld
Now think about integrating f and g – do they have areas under between them and the x-axis? The answer to ths question is important in the theory of integration.
These functions have other interesting properties and illustrate the relationship between rational and irrational numbers.
Nice Problem
Sunday 16 May 2004 at 7:28 pm | In Articles | Post CommentThere’s a very nice problem on The University of Warwick Mathematical Society’s site.
I won’t say exactly where because it has the solution there as well 😕
- If is continuously differentiable on the open interval
then prove that
Stuck!. Then click on read more for a hint
Continue reading Nice Problem…
Going dotty
Monday 10 May 2004 at 6:59 pm | In Articles | Post CommentA well-known problem is to be given 9 dots
You have to connect the dots by using 4 lines, without taking your pen off the paper and only going through each dot once. At first sight this looks impossible until you are shown you can go outside the square formed by the dots as in
But what about 16 dots arranged in a square, or 12 dots arranged in 3 rows of 4? How many lines are needed for a 10 x 10 grid? What if arcs of circles are used instead of lines?
These and other fascinating questions about dots can be found at the web page simply called dots
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