Milkshakes, Beads, and Pascal’s Triangle

Note: This is the first part of the Binomial Theorem Series

Binomial Theorem I: Milkshakes, Beads, and Pascal’s Triangle

Binomial Theorem II: The Binomial Expansion

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The Milk Shake Problem

Problem 1: Issa went to a shake kiosk and want to buy a milkshake. The shake vendor told her that she can choose plain milk, or she can choose to combine any number of flavors in any way she want. There are four flavors to choose from: Apple, Banana, Chico, and Durian.

How many possible combinations can Issa create?

It is clear that Issa can choose her milk shake to have no flavor (pure milk shake), one flavor, two flavors, three flavors, or four flavors. The possible combinations are shown below.

Table 1

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Prime Series 2: The Intuition Behind The Infinitude of Prime Numbers

Note: This is the third part of the Prime Number Series

  1. Part I: Introduction to Prime Numbers
  2. Part III: Formal Proof of the Infinitude of Prime Numbers

In Introduction to Prime Numbers, we conjectured that the number of prime numbers is decreasing as the counting numbers increase. In this post, we discuss intuitively that there is no greatest prime, or that there are infinitely many prime numbers.

Before proceeding with our discussion, it is noteworthy to remember that a number can either be prime or composite. We also know that composite numbers are product of primes.

Fragment of the original "Elements" by Euclid (via Wikimedia).

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GeoGebra Tutorial 20 – Spreadsheet, Slider and Curves of Best Fit

This the 20th tutorial of the GeoGebra Tutorial Series. If this is your first time to use GeoGebra, you might want to read first the GeoGebra Essentials Series.

In this tutorial, we use the spreadsheet window to input coordinates of points that will be plotted in the Coordinate plane.  We use the Best Fit Line tool to construct a line of best fit of the plotted points. Finally, we also use the Fitpoly command and the Slider tool to construct polynomial (with varying degrees) curves of best fit.  The output of our tutorial is shown below.

geogebra-spreadsheet-output

You can view the output of this tutorial here.

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