Coppell IB Math

In the year 1950, the English mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson was researching the correlation between shared border length and the probability of war among two adjacent countries.  Therefore, he wanted to know the length of the border shared between the countries of Portugal and Spain. When he looked up the official length, he noted something strange.

Prime numbers are in some mathematics curricula, but usually they just appear in the context of prime factoring. Wondering if a number is prime is one of the most interesting things we can do with numbers, and our students can do it as soon as they learn about odds, evens, skipcounting, and a little bit about multiplication.

The study, published in the journal Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, found that people with a musical and bilingual background activated different parts of their brain and showed less brain activity while carrying out a task than people who hadn’t had formal music training.

The intuitive strategy seems to be to join the shortest queue. After all, a short queue could indicate it has an efficient server, and a long queue could imply it has an inexperienced server or customers who need a lot of time. But generally this isn’t true.

Learning to play a musical instrument relies on understanding concepts, such as fractions and ratios, that are important for mathematical achievement. But the precise relation between music and math—whether musical training promotes mathematical ability, or mathematical skill influences musical ability, or whether these skills simply develop in parallel—remains unclear....

It might invite ridicule, but it gets results. A scientific analysis has concluded that using a “granny style” underarm technique is the optimal way to take a free throw in basketball. Adopting the unorthodox strategy could result in marginal gains for professional players, the research suggests. And, as sporting doctrine goes, marginal gains can lead to remarkable results.

Researchers at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics looked at how the ocellated lizard’s scales form their intricate patterns. The researchers took photos of the backs of three male lizards, from when they were 2 weeks old up to when they were 3 or 4 years old. Using the images, the researchers tracked the fate of approximately 5,000 hexagonal scales on their backs.

The hot hand makes intuitive sense. For instance, you can probably recall a situation, in sports or otherwise, in which you felt like you had momentum on your side – your body was in sync, your mind was focused and you were in a confident mood. In these moments of flow success feels inevitable, and effortless.

Over the past year, we have been working with the Howard County Public School System (HCPSS) in Maryland to analyze its transportation system and recommend ways to improve it. We have developed a way to optimize school bus routes, thanks to new mathematical models.

Throughout the years, great minds have come up with novel ways to solve the problem. In the early days of computer science, people figured out solutions to scenarios involving a specific number of cities, but a way to solve every traveling salesman problem with a single algorithm (that is, a single list of rules a computer can follow to find the solution) remains elusive.

There are techniques for escaping from mazes, but first you need to be sure what kind of maze it is. Most methods work for "simple" mazes, that is, ones with no sneaky short-cuts via bridges or "passage loops" – circular paths that lead back to where they started.

The NSA likely houses the largest group of world-class cryptographers and mathematicians than any other place in the world. Suffice it to say, if you’re mathematically inclined and want to make it at the NSA, you don’t just need to be good at math, you need to uniquely excel at it.

There can be few things as frustrating as being stuck in a car park for four hours on a scorching Sunday afternoon; yet this was the unhappy fate of shoppers at a new multi-storey grid car park at an IKEA store in Reading, UK.

n a series of papers posted online in recent weeks, mathematicians have solved a problem about the pattern-matching card game Set that predates the game itself. The solution, whose simplicity has stunned mathematicians, is already leading to advances in other combinatorics problems.

I took a lot of math classes in college. I remember Professor Shlomo Sternberg getting up on the first day of his class and telling us we weren’t going to see any numbers other than 0, 1, and 2. I had a great time in that one....

The data showed that students who took math in the first two periods of their six-period day performed significantly better than those who took it in the last two periods. The former group’s average math GPA was 2.02, while the latter’s was 1.91.

A pair of George Mason University students have two-squared words for you: America in a Day. Math majors Laura Maldonado, a junior, and Kathleen McLean, a senior, devised math models to help them plot day trips to cities across the country....

In a true fairy tale of a transportation project, Texas spent a measly $4.25 million widening a highway and, in defiance of conventional wisdom among transportation planners, doubled the speed of rush hour traffic on a notoriously congested highway in Dallas....

Like most discoveries, the eureka moment happened by accident. Tamar turned in her math homework and the teacher said the theory she used to solve the problem didn't actually exist. "He said if I could prove it, it could be my theory. So that's what happened," Barabi told From The Grapevine.

When it comes to catching tax cheats, the IRS has more than just federal law on its side. The agency’s arsenal also includes a mathematical truth known as Benford’s law. Armed with this law, the IRS can sniff out falsified returns just by looking at the first digit of numbers on taxpayers’ forms....

I grew up in Los Angeles, the city by the freeway by the sea. And if there’s one thing I’ve known ever since I could sit up in my car seat, it’s that you should expect to run into traffic at any point of the day. Yes, commute hours are the worst, but I’ve run into dead-stop bumper-to-bumper cars on the 405 at 2 a.m....

Thomas Petra has taught math at every level for more than 20 years and encountered dubious students at every grade level. That’s why he developed Real World Math, a free website with lessons based on Google Earth aimed at grades 5 - 10. “I was trying to show them actual applications of the math ideas that they see in the textbook,” Petra said.

Mathematics may not be the first thing your mind turns to when you are caught in a traffic jam. Yet mathematics holds the key to understanding how traffic congestion develops, and how to prevent it. Perhaps one of the best known (and most surprising) mathematical results concerning how traffic flows around a network is Braess's paradox.

Mathematics has little surprises that are designed to test and push your mental limits. The following 12 simple math problems prove outstandingly controversial among students of math, but are nonetheless facts....

Defined as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, pi, or in symbol form, π, seems a simple enough concept. But it turns out to be an "irrational number," meaning its exact value is inherently unknowable.

This was a handout that I made for my Discrete Mathematics class.  At our college this course is the gateway to the mathematics major and is the students’ introduction to writing mathematical arguments.