Why and when did you begin to teach for TPS? What was your background before that? I actually was a student with TPS when I was in high school, which is how I heard about it. I took English classes, Psychology classes, Math classes, and Government classes, and I absolutely […]
Tag: Mathematics
Polygons, Products, and Pi
Math lovers widely celebrate March 14 as Pi Day. Written as 3/14, the date matches the first three digits of pi—the constant ratio between a circle’s circumference and its diameter. One can go even further on that day, celebrating by the minute (3/14, 1:59) or the second (3/14, 1:59:26) to […]
Forgotten Algebra of the Babylonians
The trilingual Rosetta stone is justly famous for enabling the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics. But its story is far from unique to the 19th century. Hundreds of thousands of clay tablets, written with cuneiform scripts in languages such as Hittite and Persian, also became readable for the first time in […]
A Bottomless Night and a New World
Euclid’s Elements is undoubtedly the most famous single mathematical work, renowned since the 3rd century BC as a model of logical reasoning. Much of this fame comes from its five simple postulates, from which all subsequent theorems are derived. (Modern mathematicians tend to use the term axiom for fundamental premises […]
Quintic Equations, French Politics, and Abstract Algebra
The familiar quadratic formula produces the two solutions of any equation of the form ax2+bx+c. And much more elaborate formulas exist for the three solutions of cubic equations (those with an x3 term) and the four solutions of quartic equations (with an x4 term). Similarly, equations with an x5 term—quintic […]