Open Day 2006

The Open Day is an annual event in which some selected school students from some selected schools come to visit TIFR for a day. They are taken around laboratories and are given an exposure on how science is done.

We also had put up a Mathematics laboratory (whatever that means). It was more of a puzzles and games laboratory, where the puzzles and games were based on mathematical facts. For example, Shameek did experiments with geometry by introducing the school students to the Möbius band. Arati explained to them the mathematics behind the shape of the bubbles. They learnt about the types of tilings from Anupam. Sagar introduced them to Sperner's lemma. They realized that their hobbies can also have deeper meanings, when Mimansa told them about the mathematical aspect of Origami. Somnath showed them how to use mathematics to solve the problem popularly known as Towers of Hanoi. Four color theorem was done by Shane.

I decided to do something related to probability. I did Buffon's needle problem. I had wrote a flash program to simulate the experiment and used a laptop to demonstrate how one can estimate π by throwing needles on the floor. Those who want to know more about Buffon's needle problem, can visit my short write up here.

I have made a web-page on the small application I had written. You can find it here. You need Flash Player 8 or above to view it properly.

Blogs on Maths

Sorry for the delay in this blog. I'm a bit busy nowadays and that has affected the rate at which I blog quite drastically. Well I think now for a few months my blogging rate might be varying a lot. But I hope there will be at least one update per month.

I dedicate this blog to other blogs. One of my blog readers was asking me to start a Math blog with applications in mind. That induced me to search the net for Maths blogs. There shouldn't be much of an overlap, you see. Well the number of blogs on Maths seem to be quite impressive. Of course, I don't have the time and energy to go through all of them. But I did find a few which I found interesting. Some are easy to read. Some are technical. Here are a few:

A tribe

I found some of the discussions here quite good. Nice online community on Maths! :)

Some school level maths

There are some sites which remind you of the school days. Here is a site which school students will definitely like. It gives a flavour that Maths is actually a lot of fun.

Homeschool Math

This is similar to the above but the blogs deal with slightly higher topics.

Good Math, Bad Math

Thanks to Samudrika for the link to this blog! This has a bit of a computer science flavour in it.

Namespace collision

This blog does maths in a rigorous fashion in the mathematician's way. Its Maths postings tend to be a bit technical. Well it is still for beginners. The next one is completely technical.

Interesting Mathematics

Well I was wondering if there are blogs like this for every sub branch of Mathematics! No idea still now. Well I'm now tired of searching! :). The next one will be a lighter blog.

Shripad's Math fun facts!

Nice facts!

And thus ends my tour of blogs. There are thousands of other nice ones I'm sure! I'll write on them as and when I find them.

Well I'll write something original soon. My wife's coming home on her summer break next month. Just busy trying to get myself to be as free as possible during her visit here! So I will be very irregular in posting for about a month from now. (And may be quite irregular till August!) :)

But do let me know if you land up on some interesting sites!

Memories from my mathematical childhood

The reason for writing such a strange blog is the sudden realisation that sometimes we don't give enough importance to the things we have around us. I don't want to get too philosophical but all this started when I was looking for a book which I treasured a lot in my schooldays. My father is a great admirer of Mathematics and used to get me books on Mathematics and mathematical puzzles. I used to like them. One of them which was my favourite at that time was by Ya. I. Perelman. It was titled "Mathematics can be Fun". There was another book by him: "Physics can be Fun" which also I liked. Now I don't know where they are. I just searched Google for the book. Got an Amazon link. "Mathematics can be Fun" is out of print.

I spent a lot of time with the book. I specially remember and liked the discussion on Diophantine equations and pythagorean triples. I was fascinated by the fact that, for three integers a,b and c, whenever a² + b² = c², there exists integers m and n such that

a = m² - n²,
b = 2mn,
c = m² + n².

The fact that one can logically argue to get these forms really fascinated me in my high school. I also liked the section on maxima and minima done with just some basic knowledge in high school algebra.

Anyway, I really liked the book and it's really sad that Mir had to stop publishing.