Month: November 2012

Book Review: The Story of Mathematics

High School Mathematics, Miscellaneous

Three months ago, I came across with Anne Rooney’s book titled The Story of Mathematics: From Creating the Pyraminds to Exploring Infinity.  The Story of Mathematics is a great book and a recommended read for students or even teachers who want to have an encompassing overview of the history of mathematics.  The book discusses counting and measuring in the early times, ancient Egyptians and geometry, working out the movement of planets, algebra , solid geometry and the trigonometric tables, the first computers, impossible shapes and extra dimensions. It also accounts the emergence of statistics, and the development of chaos theory, fuzzy logic, and set theory.

The book focuses on the history and development of mathematics and there are only a very few ‘technical discussions’ involved, so even high school students would be able to read the book without much difficulty. The book is supplemented with beautiful illustrations which makes it more interesting.

I think The Story of Mathematics is a must-read book for high school mathematics students.

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GeoGebra 4.2 Release Candidate Now Available

GeoGebra, Software Tutorials

The GeoGebra 4.2 Release Candidate is now available. The release notes can be found here.   To familiarize yourself with the new environment, please read the GeoGebra Sneak Peek Series.

  1. Sneak Peek 1:  The GeoGebra Window
  2. Sneak Peek 2: The Object Properties
  3. Sneak Peek 3: Graphics and Layout
  4. Sneak Peek 4: Defaults and Advanced Sections
  5. Sneak Peek 5: Ten New Improvements

You may also want to check out Balazs Koren’s excellent post about version 4.2’s new features at  the Official GeoGebra Blog.

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A Calculus Primer Part 3

High School Calculus, High School Mathematics

This is the third part and the conclusion to the Mathematics and Multimedia’s Calculus Primer Series. The first part can be read here and the second part can be read here.

In the previous part of this series, we have discussed how mathematicians of the ancient times found clever ways to find the area of regions bounded by curves. We used this knowledge to generalize a way to solve the distance traveled by an accelerating car. In this post, we continue with the discussion of the second problem: How do we find the acceleration of the car at a particular instance?

Acceleration Graph - Calculus Primer

Recall that in the problem, at 2 o’clock, the speed of the car is 5 kilometers per hour and at 3 o’clock, its speed is 120 kilometers per hour. So, the acceleration is 77 km/hr/hr. » Read more

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