What is the birthday paradox? It is the fact that you only need 23 people in a room for the chance of two of them having the same birthday being over 50%. And it’s not a paradox. This probability problem is interesting and it is very hard for us to understand for several reasons. It […]
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What are the mean, median, and mode? The mean, median, and mode are all ways of calculating an average, but they are different, and they have different uses. The mean is what most of us mean when we say the average. To get the mean of a set of numbers, you add them all together
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Where did 0 come from? The concept of the modern zero was invented in India, but the idea of a placeholder for numbers was thought up by the Mesopotamians. We take the idea of the number 0 for granted. We use it regularly throughout the day (probably) and many of the things we use would
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Why did Mozart die so young? No one knows what killed him. However, it was most likely not poison. Mozart died at the age of 35 on the 5th of December 1791. He was at home in Vienna, Austria. Despite his prodigious career and being the most famous composer of his day, he died without
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Why was the abacus invented? It was invented because merchants needed to keep an inventory, trade was taking off, and the powers that be wanted their tax.. The English word abacus came from the Latin word abax, which came from the Greek word abax, which meant table or tablet. It could have come from an
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What is the golden ratio? It is 1.618. The golden ratio appears in nature, in art, in buildings, and in logos, along with countless other places. It is called the golden ratio because anything that has these proportions is considered to be perfect. It is written as Φ, which is the Greek letter phi. You
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What is the Fields Medal? It is a four-yearly prize given to mathematicians under the age of 40. It is the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize. It is named after a Canadian mathematician called John Charles Fields. The prize is a medal, similar-looking to the Nobel Prize medal, and 15,000 Canadian dollars, which, as
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On the Shoulders of Giants #1 Euclid was an ancient Greek mathematician. He is most famous for his book “The Elements”. He probably lived in the City of Alexandria in about 300 BC, but there is not much reliable historical evidence for his existence. All of the records about him were written several centuries later.
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Who invented the slide rule? Willian Oughtred in 1622. I think, first, I need to look at what a slide rule is because not many people under 60 will have ever used one. These days, if we want to do complex calculations, we can just plug them in to our phone and get the answer
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Why are there twelve months in a year? Because it is the closest match to the number of times the moon orbits the Earth in a year. Before there were names for the months, people lived by a lunar calendar. There was no need to know what month it was or what day it was.
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