Saturday, March 06, 2004
Mathematical Mistakes
So yesterday my parents held a family meeting, so we all just got together and talked. One way or another, "math" came up. And then contests (Gauss, Descartes, etc) came up, because my baby bro won the Fibonnacci and he'll be doing the Pythagoras later... so that brought up the thought of mathematical mistakes, carelessness, and things like that. 3 of them that were mentioned yesterday (so these are the top 3 until I think of something else):
- Duy and his Champs contest (in woodlands). His school placed 2nd, down by 5 points. Duy himself placed 9th regional. Why? Well, the last question, which is worth 8 points, Duy had to solve something with squares or something... anyway, at the end he had to add 12 and 25 together, so then he circled "27". In other words, had he circled 12+25="37", Woodlands would've been first and Duy would've placed 3rd. ^_^
- This happened the other day, while I was pondering in bed. "hmm... 1km/hr is pretty slow... how fast is 1km/sec?". So then I calculated... let's see... 100 km/h, I remember in physics, was ~27.78 metres per second. 1 km is 1000m, so that's 1000m/s. 27.78 is close to, but greater than, 25, 1000=25x40, = 40x100 km/h, so 1km/sec is less than 4000 km/h, but greater than 3000 km/h... ... ... DOH!"
- And last but not least, Jia's famous example: 8 x 8 x 8 x 8 = 8 x 4 = 32.
Post more mistakes!
Oh, and I found a new mission in life yesterday, but then I half accomplished it. In Number Theory class, we were discussing Prime numbers, and he listed a lot of different primes... including from previous classes, there's Mersenne Primes, Gaussian Primes, Inert Primes, Split Primes, Ramified Primes, etc.
So my new mission was to invent my own Prime. They would teach it in math courses and give it lemmas and stuff. So my mission was found yesterday, and with help of Duy and myself, here's a half definition:
Optimus Prime - the largest known prime.
and
Optimus Prime Corollary - Any other prime, say, a Rodimus Prime, has the relation: Rodimus Prime < Optimus Prime.
:) That'd be wonderful if they teach about Optimus Prime in class ^_^
Comments:
Post a Comment
- Duy and his Champs contest (in woodlands). His school placed 2nd, down by 5 points. Duy himself placed 9th regional. Why? Well, the last question, which is worth 8 points, Duy had to solve something with squares or something... anyway, at the end he had to add 12 and 25 together, so then he circled "27". In other words, had he circled 12+25="37", Woodlands would've been first and Duy would've placed 3rd. ^_^
- This happened the other day, while I was pondering in bed. "hmm... 1km/hr is pretty slow... how fast is 1km/sec?". So then I calculated... let's see... 100 km/h, I remember in physics, was ~27.78 metres per second. 1 km is 1000m, so that's 1000m/s. 27.78 is close to, but greater than, 25, 1000=25x40, = 40x100 km/h, so 1km/sec is less than 4000 km/h, but greater than 3000 km/h... ... ... DOH!"
- And last but not least, Jia's famous example: 8 x 8 x 8 x 8 = 8 x 4 = 32.
Post more mistakes!
Oh, and I found a new mission in life yesterday, but then I half accomplished it. In Number Theory class, we were discussing Prime numbers, and he listed a lot of different primes... including from previous classes, there's Mersenne Primes, Gaussian Primes, Inert Primes, Split Primes, Ramified Primes, etc.
So my new mission was to invent my own Prime. They would teach it in math courses and give it lemmas and stuff. So my mission was found yesterday, and with help of Duy and myself, here's a half definition:
Optimus Prime - the largest known prime.
and
Optimus Prime Corollary - Any other prime, say, a Rodimus Prime, has the relation: Rodimus Prime < Optimus Prime.
:) That'd be wonderful if they teach about Optimus Prime in class ^_^