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Time Travel and the Speed of Light
Time Travel and the Speed of Light This is one of my favourite videos from the legendary Carl Sagan. He explains the consequences of near to speed of light travel. This topic fits quite well into a...
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Simulations -Traffic Jams and Asteroid Impacts
Simulations -Traffic Jams and Asteroid Impacts This is a really good online Java app which has been designed by a German mathematician to study the mathematics behind traffic flow. Why do traffic...
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NASA, Aliens and Binary Codes from the Stars
NASA, Aliens and Binary Codes from the Star The Drake Equation was intended by astronomer Frank Drake to spark a dialogue about the odds of intelligent life on other planets. He was one of the founding...
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Cracking ISBN and Credit Card Codes
Cracking ISBN and Credit Card Codes ISBN codes are used on all books published worldwide. It’s a very powerful and useful code, because it has been designed so that if you enter the wrong ISBN code...
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Cracking Codes Lesson
Cracking Codes Lesson 1 Introduction: 5 minutes – Use a Morse Code Generator to play some (very slowed down) messages for students to decode. Discuss why this is was a good way to transmit data in...
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The Mathematics of Cons – Pyramid Selling
The Mathematics of Cons – Pyramid Selling Pyramid schemes are a very old con – but whilst illegal, still exist in various forms. Understanding the maths behind them therefore is a good way to avoid...
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Imagining the 4th Dimension
Imagining the 4th Dimension Imagining extra dimensions is a fantastic ToK topic – it is something which seems counter-intuitively false, something which we have no empirical evidence to support, and...
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How Are Prime Numbers Distributed? Twin Primes Conjecture
How Are Prime Numbers Distributed? Twin Primes Conjecture Thanks to a great post on the Teaching Mathematics blog about getting students to conduct an open ended investigation on consecutive numbers,...
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Sierpinski Triangles and Spirolateral Investigation Lesson Plan
Sierpinski Triangles and Spirolateral Investigation Lesson Plan Leaning Objective: Students are introduced to some more complex ideas in mathematics (fractals, infinite perimeter, fractional...
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Black Swans and Civilisation Collapse
Black Swans and Civilisation Collapse A really interesting branch of mathematics is involved in making future predictions about how civilisation will evolve in the future – and indeed looking at how...
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Bridge Building Lesson Plan
Bridge Building Lesson Plan Learning Objectives: Students are introduced to one of the many careers that they can pursue through mathematics. 5 minutes: Brainstorm – why is mathematics useful for...
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Utility Value – How Maths Can Make You Happier
Utility Value – How Maths Can Make You Happier The use of utility curves to make optimal decisions is something which is never really touched on in mathematics – even though they are a powerful tool...
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Maths IA – Exploration Topics
Maths IA – Exploration Topics: 200 ideas for investigations. The authors of the latest Pearson Mathematics SL and HL books – (which look really good) have come up with 200 ideas for students doing...
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Crack the Code to Become a Spy
GCHQ – the British cyber spy agency – have had a rough few months following some staggering revelations from Edward Snowden, so they’re doing some positive PR at the moment to highlight the importance...
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RSA Public Key Encryption – The Code that Secures the internet
Cracking RSA Code – The World’s Most Important Code? RSA code is the basis of all important data transfer. Encrypted data that needs to be sent between two parties, such as banking data or secure...
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Maths and Music
Western music has its roots in the harmonics discovered by Pythagoras – himself a keen musician – over 2000 years ago. Pythagoras noticed that certain string ratios would produce sounds that were in...
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The Gambler’s Fallacy and Casino Maths
The Gambler’s Fallacy The above video is an excellent introduction to the gambler’s fallacy. This is the misconception that prior outcomes will have an effect on subsequent independent events. The...
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The Goldbach Conjecture
The Goldbach Conjecture is one of the most famous problems in mathematics. It has remained unsolved for over 250 years – after being proposed by German mathematician Christian Goldbach in 1742....
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War Maths – Projectile Motion
War Maths – Projectile Motion Despite maths having a reputation for being a somewhat bookish subject, it is also an integral part of the seamier side of human nature and has been used by armies to...
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The Birthday Problem
The Birthday Problem One version of the birthday problem is as follows: How many people need to be in a room such that there is a greater than 50% chance that 2 people share the same birthday. This is...
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