jake baker’s maths blog

I have a student in Y10 who can recite pi to 200 places, after listening to the pi song rather a lot of times … (see http://pi.ytmnd.com/).  This led to reading more about how to calculate pi, and I found out about the Brent-Salamin algorithm, very clearly explained on Wikipedia.  I tried it out on [...]

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I spent quite some time over the Easter holidays finding expressions for the volume of a dodecahedron and icosahedron (with edge lengths 1 unit).  I found that there is a known and perhaps surprising result, that a dodecahedron fills more of a sphere which it just touches (a circumscribing sphere) than an icosahedron.
 Here are the [...]

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Mobile phones: we all use them, but how do they work? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone . Is this article helpful, in your opinion? Have you found any other websites which give useful information about mobile phones? Please add a comment, copying in the website address if you have.

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me and my further maths class are finding the continuity correction for discrete distributions being estimated by the normal distribution rather fiddly to be confident of. anyone got any good ways to understand this?

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