- Mathematics and Multimedia

Daily Archives: January 16, 2011

WordPress Tutorial 6 – Basic Blogging Tips 1

Posted on January 16, 2011 by Guillermo Bautista | 2 Comments

As I have promised before, I will not only teach you how to blog using WordPress, but also help you how to “grow” it. After all, what’s the use of a blog when you are the only one, or only a handful of people are reading it.

We have learned the basics of WordPress blogging: We have learned how to register a WordPress blog, write a draft article and publish a post, how to link to other documents , and how to embed videos for Youtube.

Before continuing the series, let us learn some of the basic things that we should consider before starting to blog seriously. It is important that we know from the start what we want write than think about it later. Note, however, that I am no blogging expert. All the tips that I will discuss are from personal experiences in growing Mathematics and Multimedia. As you can see, Mathematics and Multimedia is only fifteen months old, but despite being a math blog (which supposedly has a handful of readers), it has reached about 200,000 hits as of this writing, so I suppose that I must be doing something right.

In the following discussion, I have used Mathematics and Multimedia as context. This will make it contextual and not too Continue reading →

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Posted in Teaching Tools, Web 2.0 Technology

Tagged wordpress blogging tutorial, wordpress how embed videos, wordpress how to link to other documents, wordpress how to publish a post, wordpress how to register a blog

Understanding the Fermat’s Last Theorem

Posted on January 16, 2011 by Guillermo Bautista | 9 Comments

The Fermat’s last theorem is one of the hardest problems in the history of mathematics. The problem was written by Pierre de Fermat in 1637, and it was only solved more than 300 years later — in 1995 by Professor Andrew Wiles.

But what is exactly the Fermat’s Last Theorem?

Fermat’s Last Theorem is an extension of the Pythagorean Theorem. Recall that the Pythagorean Theorem states that given a right triangle with sides $x, y$ and hypotenuse $z$ , equation $x^2 + y^2 = z^2$ is satisfied. For example, a right triangle with side lengths $2$ , and $3$ has hypotenuse $\sqrt{13}$ .

There are some interesting things that we can see if we examine the side lengths of right triangles. For instance, if we let the triples $(x,y,z)$ be the side lengths of a right triangle, where $z$ is the hypotenuse, we can find triples such that all the numbers in the triple are all integers. The triples $(3, 4, 5)$ , $(5,12,13)$ , $(8,15,17)$ are integer triples, and they satisfy the Pythagorean theorem. This triples are called Pythagorean Triples. It is not also difficult to see that there are infinitely many Pythagorean triples (Can you see why?). Continue reading →