Articles About Mathematics

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Tournament Scheduling

Scheduling games is a little more challenging than one might desire. Here are some tournament formats that sport schedulers use.

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Infinity is not a number, and trying to treat it as one tends to be a pretty bad idea. At best you're likely to come away with a headache, at worse the firm belief that 1 = 0. This article discusses the different types of infinity.

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Divisibility Tests

This article explains various divisibility rules and why they work. An article to read with pencil and paper handy.

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Ding Dong Bell

The reader is invited to investigate changes (or permutations) in the ringing of church bells, illustrated by braid diagrams showing the order in which the bells are rung.

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The Random World

Think that a coin toss is 50-50 heads or tails? Read on to appreciate the ever-changing and random nature of the world in which we live.

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The Best Card Trick?

Age

11 to 16

Challenge level

Time for a little mathemagic! Choose any five cards from a pack and show four of them to your partner. How can they work out the fifth?

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Mouhefanggai

Imagine two identical cylindrical pipes meeting at right angles and think about the shape of the space which belongs to both pipes. Early Chinese mathematicians call this shape the mouhefanggai.

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Some Circuits in Graph or Network Theory

Eulerian and Hamiltonian circuits are defined with some simple examples and a couple of puzzles to illustrate Hamiltonian circuits.

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Whole Number Dynamics I

The first of five articles concentrating on whole number dynamics, ideas of general dynamical systems are introduced and seen in concrete cases.

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Sums of Powers - A Festive Story

A story for students about adding powers of integers - with a festive twist.

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The Chinese Remainder Theorem

In this article we shall consider how to solve problems such as "Find all integers that leave a remainder of 1 when divided by 2, 3, and 5."

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Links and Knots

Some puzzles requiring no knowledge of knot theory, just a careful inspection of the patterns. A glimpse of the classification of knots, prime knots, crossing numbers and knot arithmetic.

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Keeping It Safe and Quiet

Simon Singh describes PKC, its origins, and why the science of code making and breaking is such a secret occupation.

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Proofs With Pictures

Some diagrammatic 'proofs' of algebraic identities and inequalities.

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Mathematics in the Financial Markets

Financial markets mean the business of trading risk. The article describes in simple terms what is involved in this trading, the work people do and the figures for starting salaries.

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Infinite Continued Fractions

In this article we are going to look at infinite continued fractions - continued fractions that do not terminate.

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Conic Sections

The interplay between the two and three dimensional Euclidean geometry of conic sections is explored in this article. Suitable for students from 16+, teachers and parents.