Month: November 2011

November 2011 Week 2 Post List

Post Summary

This has been a busy week. Last Thursday I talked at DZUP 1602, our university’s official radio station about blogging. Looks like teaching blogging is a new career path because our institute is developing a new website and we will use Wordpess as platform. For those who are intereseted to learn how to blog, you may want to check out Blogineering a site Riley and I created to teach new bloggers to get started.  Anyway, here are this week’s posts.

Math and Multimedia

Blogineering (A blogging tutorial site)
  • What is self hosted blogging?
  • Building your community
  • How to automatically import blog posts to Twitter
My Other Blogs
Updated GeoGebra Tutorials for 4.0
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Link Post: Applying Mathematics to Web Design

Beauty of Math, Math in Real Life, Math Lite

“Mathematics is beautiful.” This may sound absurd to people who wince at numbers and equations. But some of the most beautiful things in nature and our universe exhibit mathematical properties, from the smallest seashell to the biggest whirlpool galaxies. In fact, one of the greatest ancient philosophers, Aristotle, said: “The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order, symmetry and limitation; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.”

Because of its beautiful nature, mathematics has been a part of art and architectural design for ages. But it has not been exploited much for website design. This is probably because many of us regard mathematics as being antithetical to creativity. On the contrary, mathematics can be a tool to produce creative designs. That said, you don’t have to rely on math for every design. The point is that you should regard it as your friend, not a foe. For illustrative purposes, we created a couple of web designs that present mathematical principles discussed in this article. We are also giving away a couple of PSDs that you can use right away in your next design. Continue reading…

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Linking sum of counting numbers to triangle area

High School Algebra, High School Geometry, High School Mathematics

We have discussed how Gauss was able to add the first 100 counting numbers, and we learned ways how to generalize his method.  In this post, we link his method in finding the area of triangles.

Adding the first few counting numbers is easy. However, as the numbers become larger, it becomes harder. According to an anecdote, Gauss at primary school was able to find a clever way of answering the question his teacher asked him:  What is the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 100?

Gauss method was to add the first and the last digit (1 and 100), the second and the second to the last digit (2 and 99), third and the third to the last digit (3 and 98), and found out that the sums were always 101. There are 50 pairs of numbers from 1 to 100 whose sum is 101. So,  the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 100 is (101)(50) = 5050. » Read more

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