# 7 Must-See Mathematics Movies Inspired by True Events

I have watched many movies about mathematics, mathematicians, and about mathematics teachers, but I particularly like the seven below because they were inspired by true events. Although many of them diverge from actual events, I still find them more realistic compared to other movies of the same genre. For those who have not watched these movies, don’t worry as there are no spoilers in the descriptions.

1.) Stand and Deliver (1988)

Main Cast: Edward James Olmos

Stand and Deliver tells a story of high school teacher Jaime Escalante who inspired his troublesome and dropout prone students in Garfield High School to learn calculus. Many of his students pass the AP Calculus exam only to be accused by the testing board of cheating.

2.) A Beautiful Mind (2001)

Main Cast: Russell Crowe

A Beautiful Mind is a biographical film based on the life of mathematician John Forbes Nash. It centers in his struggle against paranoid schizophrenia and his relationship with his wife.  Continue reading

# 76 Youtube Calculus Tutorials and More by Prof Leonard

For those who are studying undergraduate calculus, Prof Leonard is another addition to the video tutorials I have already shared in Math and Multimedia. The Prof Leonard channel contains 76 Calculus I, II, and III videos ranging from 15 minutes up to more than 3 hours. Most of the videos are about 1 hour in length. The channel also contains videos on Intermediate Algebra and Statistics.

I have shared several Youtube channels in this blog about calculus particularly that of Khan Academy, MIT Open Courseware, and Patrick JMT tutorials. You can also visit more video tutorials here.

# MIT Open Courseware: Free Math Videos and Learning Materials

In the previous post I have shared to you Khan Academy, a website where you can learn mathematics by watching videos and answering questions. Most of the materials in Khan Academy in mathematics are in K-12.

In this post, I am going to introduce to you another website where you can watch video and download teaching and learning materials in undegraduate and graduate mathematics: the MIT Open Courseware. The MIT Open Courseware is a website by the Massachusettes Institute of Technology where they publish actual class videos from the said Institute. This means that unlike Khan Academy where you see an electronic whiteboard/blackboard, in MIT Courseware you see real professors teaching and interacting with students. Below is one of the videos from the said website.  Continue reading

# Revisiting Khan Academy After Four Years

It was four years ago when I discovered Khan Academy, which as far as I can remember a Youtube channel with more than a thousand videos. If I am not mistaken, it was only then managed by Salman Khan, it’s founder.

A year ago or two, when I searched the internet, I learned that Khan Academy has already its own website and it is run already by a group of educators. Three weeks ago, I started using the website. As of this writing, I have already watched 29 videos (oh yes, I watched them from start to end) and earned 56,340 points. 🙂  Continue reading

# Understanding the Concept of Inverse Functions

Let us consider the functions

$f(x) = x^3$  and $g(x) = \sqrt[3]{x}$.

The table on the left shows the ordered pairs $(x,f(x))$. We used $f(x)$ and substitute them to $x$ in the second table.

As we can see, all the values of $g(x)$ are the same as those of $x$ in the first table. For example,  if we have $x = 3$ in the first table, applying $f$, we get  27 as output. On the other hand, if we apply $g$ to 27, the value returns to $3$Continue reading