Free Ivy league courses!

There is an amazing range of courses available online for those of you who possibly cannot afford the tutition fees or just want to learn a bit more about something you are interested in.

The website can be found here.

This is a great free resource from some of the best universities in the World including Yale, Stanford, MIT and Havard (whose CS50 course has been featured before on this blog in the post Learn to code for free)

Apple news

Apple has been making the news again today, but not for the reasons it would like. In contrast to the usual news stories about how many records the sales of its latest product has broke, Apple is in the news today due to its expected publication of falling profits for the first time in a decade.

A really good article about how this has happened to Apple can be found here.

While the situation at Apple is not yet critical it is worrying to see its continuing decline. A ground breaking new innovation like its past successes would be very welcome at the moment.

Source: The guardian

Wayback machine

This really interesting website found here allows you to see what websites use to look like in the past.

Above is a picture of how google used to look in December 1998!

Super-powered battery breakthrough

Yesterday I was thinking that if someone invented a battery that allowed a smart phone to last for a week rather than a day then they would become very, very rich. 

This morning I spotted this news story from BBC news. I am very pleased there are already people working on making this into a reality and are making breakthroughs in bringing this technology to consumers.

Source: BBC news

Why do a maths degree?

Student who study mathematics at university are very often seen as purely number crunchers however the truth about doing a maths degree is very different. While being very numerically capable is important in being a mathemtician it is just as important to be a very curious and logical problem solver.

It is a common misconception that a degree in mathematics leads only into a job as an accountant or a banker however the reality is much, much more varied. The skills you develop by doing a mathematics degree are  applicable to many different careers. See the earlier brochure in the post post maths is everywhere to truly get a scale of the true impact mathematicians have on the modern world.

The most commonly used mathematics today

What is the most used piece of mathematics in the present day?

 

The answer is a cryptography technique used to keep all of the world's banking details secure.

The technique takes an input call it a and is for example your PIN and then puts it through a function which outputs a generator to the power of a modulo a large prime.

a->g^(a)

This function has the property that if you steal the data g^(a) it is very difficult to get the original a out. This is obviously a very useful property for protecting private information.

So when you input your PIN a, g^(a) is computed then this is compared to a stored list of g^(a) before access is given.

Acapella maths puns

This very clever song has so many maths puns included there is almost one every other word. It is very catchy as well!

Watch the video on youtube here

Horizon: Tomorrow's world

Horizon have produced yet another fascinating programme about current cutting edge technology and what potential this has for the future. It is well worth a watch for anyone interested in any form of science.

It is available on BBC's iplayer here

The bridges of Königsberg

Is it possible to start and end in the same place without crossing the same bridge twice?

The problem is based on the city of Königsberg, now known as Kaliningrad, in Russia. The question is: is it possible to start in one place (A,B,C or D) cross every bridge once and only once and end in the same place you started?

Can mathematical models predict the future?

The BBC's Horizon has madea  television programme on how using mathematical models on the large amounts of data now available can do  incredible things such as:

• Predicting where and when crime will occur before it happens
• Mapping out the entire universe
• Financial formulas for scientifically predicting whether stock prices will go up or down rather than relying on gut feeling
• Using genetics (a vast data set) to predict and understand diseasesso they can be cured

The programme can be found on the  BBC's iplayer here

Im figuratively drooling over the huge possibilites this kind of research has for the future.

Pi's infinite nature

Source: IFLS