Kicking us off on our first session of the morning was Matt Parker @standupmaths who shared how he's planning to break the world record for the most digits of π calculated by hand, for next π day (see his other attempts here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhtC92GarkjyYbxI3-4qzIWIRbZaw4wuP). We also heard from Bob Huxley, who has also been thinking about π day, but this time on Mars where it turns out it's actually tomorrow! Annette Margolis then talked about her class' favourite (and least favourite) way to solve quadratic equations. John Hoskinson discussed Diffy Squares (https://mathforlove.com/2020/03/diffy-squares/) and adapted them to generalised diffy N-gons - for odd N, you get repeating cycles! Nobody has ever said the word 'diffy' more times in the space of 5 minutes. Alistair Bird @outofthenorm shared about a mathematician who got inspired in the bath (but not that one), and what his discovery meant (turns out, not much, but it did inspire some nice results around Fermat's Last Theorem). Read more here: https://outofthenormmaths.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/blitz-krieger/ Adam Atkinson talked about Misère Games, leading to his discovery of just how many semigroups of order 8 there are, inducting us all into membership of DOCTIAL (the Department of 'Crikey! That Is A Lot!'); and finally Harlan Connor got LOUD about signal processing - it's possible to have peaks in audio volume that are higher than the maximum value the system can store! #mathsjam #maths #pi #worldrecords #mars #piday #quadraticequations #classwork #teaching #diffysquares #baths #inspiration #misèregames #doctial #loud #signalprocessing #groups #monoids #semigroups #combinatorialgametheory

@dandersod Another thought about completing the square: It is helpful to know explicitly the following variant of the binomial formula,

\[ x^2 + a x + \tfrac14 a^2 = (x + \tfrac12 a)^2, \]

because it shows more clearly which number is needed when completing the square.

#TeachingMath #algebra #math #QuadraticEquations

My brain has decided it wants to do some quadratic equations. I have no idea why. If you know of a good website or app for refreshing math skills, I’d like to hear about it. #Math #Algebra #QuadraticEquations #AskFedi