What is 8.426149773176359....

...and the other joys of Square Root Day.

Hint: the answer is the 20th prime number.

Well this should resolve the Newton v Leibniz controversy once and for all!

An obscure prayer book auctioned off in London ten years ago would seem to indicate that Archimedes had discovered the core tenets of the Calculus over 2000 years ago. This news would have been discovered sooner if some medieval monk hadn't rubbed out most of the maths and scribbled prayers over it. It is not yet known whether said monk was indeed an ancestor of former American president George W. Bush.

Is our childrens learning?

A summit of educators, held this week in New York City, has called for a sweeping overhaul of science and maths education in the US as American students continue to fall behind. As a country the no longer makes much of anything the US will have to rely on intellectual achievements to keep its economy ahead of the pack or it will certainly slide backwards and become a agricultural state.

Eager not to be left behind Florida and Oklahoma are already leading the way!

[Sigh]

The music of the circles

This is ever so cool. It lets you assign musical notes to integers and then plays the first 10,000 positions of π, (Note: be patient. It may be some time before you come up with something you're willing to listen to.)

Today in infamy - Life of Π edition

On this date in 1897 the Indiana State legislature almost introduced a "new mathematical truth" but defined the exact value of Π as 3.2. The act passed the House unanimously but someone with some sense* intervened before the world went out of round.

For you Hoosiers out there these are the first 50 decimal positions of the infinite, irrational number: 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510

* Mathematics professor C.A. Waldo of Purdue University

Monday morning maths

Once you've have your second cup of coffee I wish to remind you that 0.99 = 1.

I'm sure you knew this once but may have forgotten!