Tea Parties and Twitter

Watch this video to learn about how I dressed as my professor and presented a math modeling project about BROWNIES. All in the same day.

wolframalpha:

The tremendously prolific mathematician Leonhard Euler was born 306 years ago today. 

We have lots of information about his achievements, which were many. Just keep clicking “More”. 

Alfred Korzybski, Polish-American philosopher, scientist, engineer, mathematician, linguist, logician, author of Science & Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, and is remembered most for developing the theory of general semantics (1879-1950).

Also consider The Lousy Linguist’s Why Linguists Should Study Maths.

(via transliterations)

YES! ETERNALLY YES! Math is a language. I wish it were taught that way, with more theory and application so that younger students could see the beauty in it and the purpose. Imagine how boring English classes would be (Sorry for the English language centric POV, feel free to insert any other language) if you only learned grammar and a small amount of vocabulary. You were never given a story to read, though you maybe were hurriedly told that they existed and if you learned the rules of grammar perfectly you might be able to read one some day.

Because that is how math is taught most of the time.

Even if math isn’t applied—it’s still expressing an idea. It’s way more than just numbers. The Greeks didn’t really use numbers, at least not the way we do. Open up a copy of Euclid’s Elements. It’s propositions written out with ratio and magnitude. They are logic problems that also teach you the rules of Euclidean geometry. You might be sitting there wondering why anyone would bother learning Euclidean Geometry as written by Euclid at this point? Well. If you want to study Newton’s Principia—you need to be grounded in Euclid and Apollonius’s Conic Sections. Newton relied heavily on both to construct his proofs. The whole thing is written geometrically, even though it introduces the principles of The Calculus. (There is a reason we use Leibnizian notation and not Newtonian. Newton’s is impossible to use in any sort of useful way. It’s good if you want to write incredibly cryptic propositions that three other people can comprehend.)

In the Western world—algebra didn’t come in to use until Descartes was like, “Huh. If I put this geometry on a graph with numbers I can do things with it.” (He went to tutor the Queen of Sweden in math to avoid joining the army. He died of a lung infection in her drafty castle. So if you loathe algebra there is some satisfaction for you.)

If we were taught geometry and logic first, then algebra and calculus—with explanations of why these branches of math were needed, how they grew and what people wanted to do with them? I think math would make more sense to people and would be more interesting.

Do you know why they tried to find Calculus for so many thousands of years? (Archimedes tried and got sort of there, but not really.)

Imagine a line. Square it. When you square a line you literally get a square. Imagine a circle. Square it. Well, you can’t using simple geometry, or even complicated geometry. Algebra won’t do it either. Calculus does. It finds the area under a curve. Obviously the applications of Calculus extend way far beyond this, but that’s what the original search was driven by. Squaring the circle. It was such a Holy Grail kind of quest that Dante uses it as an analogy at the end of The Paradiso for seeing and becoming one with God in Heaven.

I just realized I can’t “read more” cut this. I am sorry if your eyes are glazing over. But I love math. I love it so much.

(via imaginarycircus)

(Source: mymindtank, via imaginarycircus)

charlesdutton:

how do people even invent math stuff like who was sitting around a hundred years ago or whatever and thought to themselves “you know what we need? negative exponents” 

Well, fractions were used thousands of years ago by Babylonians. Fractions weren’t represented by negative exponents until 1676. Newton was the first one to use them.

But math is invented/discovered in lots of different ways. For instance, Newton invented calculus to explain kinematics in physics, but a lot of mathematicians just spend their time thinking about really cool concepts, and it’s not until later that we realize that there’s actually a use for it in science or computer programming or economics.

(via faketexting)

buttmeg:

unnaturallogarhythm:

luftkissenfahrzeug:

clarri:

wowfunniestposts:

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Calculus

Harry potter and the Prisoner of Algebra

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Theorem

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Analysis

Harry Potter and the Order of Operations

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Statistician

Harry Potter and the Deathly Algorithms

OH MY FUCKING GOD

AND THE ORDER OF OPERATIONS

I can’t even

omfg i am so done

It’s Harry PLOTTER (credit to Math Horizons)

(Source: fontelitist, via faketexting)

samashies:

Is it weird that I’m fangirling over a new prime discovery?

It’s just so cool! Also, we’ve been studying those types of primes in Number Theory.

My new avatar: Me and my friends playing a cool math game.

I recommend 10/10.

[my hand is the one with the black ring next to the hand with the orange nail polish, fyi]

e1n:

ihaventeateninthreehours:

digitalhoarder:

BECAUSE I HAVE NO LIFE AND THIS IS REALLY BOTHERING ME…

The prevailing theory on Tumblr on how Sherlock survived the fall was that he managed to land in a laundry truck.

Benedict Cumberbatch is 1.84 meters tall and by using his body you can measure how far from the building he would have had to jump to make it into the truck. Roughly 7.32 meters.

Sherlock is standing on the Pathological Department of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Google Street View shows what appears to be Routemaster double-decker buses which are 4.38 meters tall. The building therefore is roughly 14.6 meters. 

You can use Pythagoras’ theorem to calculate the distance which is 16.33 meters. FYI: The World Record for men’s long jump is 8.95 meters and that was done with a running start. Sherlock flopped over the edge with no horizontal directional speed. I don’t think it’s possible for the laundry truck theory. 

EDIT: how much time he had to “steer” towards the truck while falling.

Time = √ 2(height)/gravity
Time = √ 2(14.6m)/9.8 m/s²
Time = √ 29.2m/9.8 m/s²
Time = √ 2.98 m/s²
Time = 1.73 seconds

Sherlock was falling for 1.73 seconds.

Question: Can you jump off a 14.6 meter building and land in a truck full of laundry 7.23 meters away in 1.73 seconds?

Sorry to burst everyone’s bubble but this is not quite right.

People don’t fall in straight lines, they fall in parabolas. So Pythagoras has nothing to do with this. What we need is projectile motion physics.

The dark red is the path he would actually take.

So using these figures it still takes 1.73 seconds to fall vertically 14.6m with an acceleration of 9.8 ms-1. 

But travelling horizontally there is no acceleration or deceleration. To travel the 7.32m to the truck Sherlock would only have to take off from the roof at 4.23 ms-1. (Because of air resistance he may have fallen slower and taken a longer time therefore this number may be even lower). Average human walking speed is between 4 to 6 ms-1 (I couldn’t find an exact number) so for Sherlock to have reached the truck in that time he would only have to step off. By falling the way he did it looks like he didn’t push off but there is actually a lot more horizontal velocity than if he had just stepped so he could actually reach the truck.

Also this explains why Sherlock chose such a tall building. If the height wasn’t as large he couldn’t have made it that distance to the truck.

tl;dr: Sherlock could have made it to the truck without any particular effort. The truck theory is still viable.

I’m going to regret jumping on this, but the Parabola theory above is the correct one.  You don’t fall in a straight line like what the original theory said. 

That said, in order to make 7.32m of horizontal displacement, you need 4.23m/s of horizontal speed, which is NOT walking speed.  According to Wikipedia (on Walking), average human walking speed is 3.1mph, or 1.4m/s.  4.23m/s amounts to about 9.5mph, which is a running speed.  If you don’t believe me, get on a treadmill and set the “speed” to 9.5.  I guarantee you’ll be running like hell.

Taking into account air resistance and all that shit, I’d imagine he’d be pretty lucky to be able to land on the truck.  But even if he was that lucky, landing on the back of that truck will really break some shit.  There has to be a more elegant solution to this, although it was really really suspicious that the truck just drove by after a person jumped off the building and landed next to it.

I’m more intrigued by this:

The truck went missing in one scene. Then it reappeared and drove away, but in the following cut, the truck was back to where it was when it first started.

Maybe it was just badly edited.  But maybe…

(via wesmilesvirus)

xmashies:

theladythorki:

gloomyteens:

when can i apply

‘what does 237 mean’

i actually dont know how to answer that question

Without knowing the context of the course, it’s a bit arrogant to assume that he’s writing something that is actually wrong unless you have some level of math expertise. Are you a math major? Have you taken any upper-level math courses? If you look to the right of what he wrote about 237, it’s likely he is talking about bases, starting with base 10 to demonstrate others. He’s likely writing something that would be false in base 10 but is true in some other base. For instance, in base 9, 37 = 2 X 18 is equivalent to 34 = 2 X 17 Please don’t judge a (really prestigious) college because you don’t understand math past the high-school level. This is material typically covered in Algebra II, which is offered at most US high schools.

Emory University is a really good school in my state, so I doubt he would be teaching incorrect arithmetic (or any arithmetic, for that matter).

Do us all a favor and shut up if you don’t know anything about college math. Lots of us even learned this in high school, and you’re making yourself look really ignorant right now.

THANK YOU SAMANTHA. What’s troubling about the OP is not that they don’t understand how kick-ass bases are; it’s that rather than trying to understand something, people would rather mock it and assume that it can be explained by their knowledge of arithmetic. Math is freaking awesome, and I’m sick of seeing it dismissed on Tumblr.

P.S. Emory is an awesome school, and I hope this image does not discourage anyone from applying.

(Source: death-or-taxes, via samashies)

BRB fangirling.