Citizen Maths: A Free Online Course That Teaches Adults the Math They Missed in High School

in Math, Online Courses | November 5th, 2015

Many peo­ple still have a major fear of math­e­mat­ics, hav­ing suf­fered through school and not real­ly hav­ing been in the right frame of mind to grasp con­cepts that we’ve been told will come in handy in our future work­ing lives. When Britons get to the age of 16, many can choose to leave school, escap­ing the ter­ror of math (or, as they say, maths).

But we shouldn’t live in fear, so along comes Cit­i­zen Maths, a UK-based free online course that pur­ports to help adults catch up with Lev­el 2 math (aka what a 16-year-old should know) with­out get­ting hit with a ruler or a spit wad. The course is fund­ed by the UFI Char­i­ta­ble Trust, which focus­es on pro­vid­ing free edu­ca­tion for adults.

The Cit­i­zen Maths course cur­rent­ly con­sists of three units—Proportion, Uncer­tain­ty, and Rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Addi­tion­al sec­tions on Pat­tern and Mea­sure­ments will soon fol­low. All units come with videos and tests that take about an hour of the viewer’s time. As the nar­ra­tor says, you can “learn in safe­ty, with­out fear of being told off or exposed.” The full course takes, on aver­age, about 20 hours.

And the tuto­ri­als bring in the real world, not just the abstract. Ratios and odds are expe­ri­enced through roulette, horse rac­ing, and play­ing dice. Under­stand­ing insur­ance comes into the tuto­r­i­al on mak­ing deci­sions. Mod­el­ing is explained by try­ing to under­stand weath­er pat­terns. And pro­por­tion is explained through bak­ing recipes and mak­ing cock­tails.

You will need a Google Account to get start­ed, though, for those with­out one, there is a sim­ple guide to get you start­ed. The tuto­ri­als fea­ture YouTube instruc­tion along with an embed­ded app called Scratch.

As of this post, three of the five sec­tions are avail­able, with the com­plete course due up by next year. You can find more advanced Math cours­es in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Math Cours­es.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Math Cours­es

Free Math Text­books

The Unex­pect­ed Math Behind Van Gogh’s “Star­ry Night”

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Adam Savage’s Animated Lesson on the Simple Ideas That Lead to Great Scientific Discoveries

in Astronomy, Math, Physics, Science, TED Talks | October 2nd, 2015

Edu­ca­tor, indus­tri­al design fab­ri­ca­tor and Myth Busters cohost Adam Sav­age is dri­ven by curios­i­ty.

Sci­ence gets his wheels turn­ing faster than the notched disc Hip­poly­te Fizeau used to mea­sure the speed of light in 1849.

In his TED-Ed talk on how sim­ple ideas lead to sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies, above, Sav­age zips across the cen­turies to share the work of three game chang­ers — Fizeau, Eratos­thenes, and Richard Feyn­man (one of the de fac­to patron saints of sci­ence-relat­ed TED talks).

I found it dif­fi­cult to wrap my head around the sheer quan­ti­ties of infor­ma­tion Sav­age shoe­horns into the sev­en minute video, giv­ing sim­i­lar­ly vol­u­ble and omniv­o­rous math­mu­si­cian Vi Hart a run for her mon­ey. Clear­ly, he under­stands exact­ly what he’s talk­ing about, where­as I had to take the review quiz in an attempt to retain just a bit of this new-to-me mate­r­i­al.

I’m glad he glossed over Feynman’s child­hood fas­ci­na­tion with iner­tia in order to spend more time on the less­er known of his three sub­jects. Lit­tle Feynman’s obser­va­tion of his toy wag­on is charm­ing, but the Nobel Prize winner’s life became an open book to me with Jim Otta­viani and Leland Myrick’s excel­lent graph­ic biog­ra­phy. What’s left to dis­cov­er?

How about Eratos­thenes? I’d nev­er before heard of the Alexan­dri­an librar­i­an who cal­cu­lat­ed the Earth­’s cir­cum­fer­ence with aston­ish­ing accu­ra­cy around 200 BC. (It helped that he was good at math and geog­ra­phy, the lat­ter of which he invent­ed.) Inspi­ra­tion fuels the arts, much as it does sci­ence, and I’d like to learn more about him.

Dit­to Fizeau, whom Sav­age describes as a less sexy sci­en­tif­ic swash­buck­ler than method­i­cal fact check­er, which is what he was doing when he wound up crack­ing the speed of light in 1849. Two cen­turies ear­li­er Galileo used lanterns to deter­mine that light trav­els at least ten times faster than sound. Fizeau put Galileo’s num­ber to the test, exper­i­ment­ing with his notched wheel, a can­dle, and mir­rors and ulti­mate­ly set­ting the speed of light at a much more accu­rate 313,300 Km/s. Today’s mea­sure­ment of 299792.458 km/s was arrived at using tech­nol­o­gy unthink­able even a few decades ago.

Per­son­al­ly, I would nev­er think to mea­sure the speed of light with some­thing that sounds like a zoetrope, but I might write a play about some­one who did.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil deGrasse Tyson Deliv­ers the Great­est Sci­ence Ser­mon Ever

The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics, The Most Pop­u­lar Physics Book Ever Writ­ten, Now Com­plete­ly Online

Sam Har­ris: Sci­ence Can Answer Moral Ques­tions

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Her play, Fawn­book, opens in New York City lat­er this fall. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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The World Record for the Shortest Math Article: 2 Words

in Math | April 15th, 2015

shortest math paper

On Mon­day, on a lark, we post­ed what we thought was The Short­est-Known Paper Pub­lished in a Seri­ous Math Jour­nal. Two suc­cinct sen­tences.

But then today, an OC read­er gave us a heads-up on a more extreme dis­play of brevi­ty. In 2004, John Con­way and Alexan­der Soifer, both work­ing on math­e­mat­ics at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, sub­mit­ted to the Amer­i­can Math­e­mat­i­cal Month­ly what they believed was “a new world record in the num­ber of words in a [math] paper.”

Soifer explains: “On April 28, 2004 … I sub­mit­ted our paper that includ­ed just two words, ‘n2 + 2 can’ and our two draw­ings. [See one of them above.]” The sto­ry then con­tin­ues: “The Amer­i­can Math­e­mat­i­cal Month­ly was sur­prised, and did not know what to do about our new world record of a 2‑word arti­cle. Two days lat­er, on April 30, 2004, the Edi­to­r­i­al Assis­tant Mrs. Mar­garet Combs acknowl­edged the receipt of the paper”:

The Month­ly pub­lish­es expo­si­tion of math­e­mat­ics at many lev­els, and it con­tains arti­cles both long and short. Your arti­cle, how­ev­er, is a bit too short to be a good Month­ly arti­cle… A line or two of expla­na­tion would real­ly help.

Soifer writ­ers: “The same day at the cof­fee hour I asked John [Con­way], ‘What do you think?’ His answer was con­cise, ‘Do not give up too eas­i­ly.’ Accord­ing­ly, I replied [to] The Month­ly the same day”:

I respect­ful­ly dis­agree that a short paper in general—and this paper in particular—merely due to its size must be “a bit too short to be a good Month­ly arti­cle.” Is there a con­nec­tion between quan­ti­ty and qual­i­ty?… We have posed a fine (in our opin­ion) open prob­lem and report­ed two dis­tinct “behold-style” proofs of our advance on this prob­lem. What else is there to explain?

Soifer adds: “The Month­ly, appar­ent­ly felt out­gunned, for on May 4, 2004, the reply came from The Monthly’s top gun, Edi­tor-in-Chief Bruce Pal­ka”:

The Month­ly pub­lish­es two types of papers: “arti­cles,” which are sub­stan­tive expos­i­to­ry papers rang­ing in length from about six to twen­ty-five pages, and “notes,” which are short­er, fre­quent­ly some­what more tech­ni­cal pieces (typ­i­cal­ly in the one-to-five page range). I can send your paper to the notes edi­tor if you wish, but I expect that he’ll not be inter­est­ed in it either because of its length and lack of any sub­stan­tial accom­pa­ny­ing text. The stan­dard way in which we use such short papers these days is as “boxed filler” on pages that would oth­er­wise con­tain a lot of the blank space that pub­lish­ers abhor. If you’d allow us to use your paper in that way, I’d be hap­py to pub­lish it.

Soifer con­cludes: “John Con­way and I accept­ed the ‘filler’, and in the Jan­u­ary 2005 issue our paper was pub­lished.” Vic­to­ry!

Get more of the back­sto­ry here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Short­est-Known Paper Pub­lished in a Seri­ous Math Jour­nal: Two Suc­cinct Sen­tences

60 Free Online Math Cours­es

Free Math Text­books

The Math in Good Will Hunt­ing is Easy: How Do You Like Them Apples?

Does Math Objec­tive­ly Exist, or Is It a Human Cre­ation? A New PBS Video Explores a Time­less Ques­tion

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The Shortest-Known Paper Published in a Serious Math Journal: Two Succinct Sentences

in Math | April 13th, 2015

shortest math paper

Euler’s con­jec­ture, a the­o­ry pro­posed by Leon­hard Euler in 1769, hung in there for 200 years. Then L.J. Lan­der and T.R. Parkin came along in 1966, and debunked the con­jec­ture in two swift sen­tences. Their arti­cle — which is now open access and can be down­loaded here — appeared in the Bul­letin of the Amer­i­can Math­e­mat­i­cal Soci­ety. If you’re won­der­ing what the con­jec­ture and its refu­ta­tion are all about, you might want to ask Cliff Pick­over, the author of 45 books on math and sci­ence. He brought this curi­ous doc­u­ment to the web last week.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

60 Free Online Math Cours­es

Free Math Text­books

The Math in Good Will Hunt­ing is Easy: How Do You Like Them Apples?

Does Math Objec­tive­ly Exist, or Is It a Human Cre­ation? A New PBS Video Explores a Time­less Ques­tion

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1000 Digits of Pi, Recited by Jane Barbe, Famous Voice of Telephone Company Recordings

in Math | October 2nd, 2014

If you came of age dur­ing the 1960s and 1970s, you knew the voice of Jane Barbe, aka “The Tele­phone Lady.” Her voice appeared on tele­phone com­pa­ny record­ings and voice­mail sys­tems across the US. Just lis­ten to this clip, and you will imme­di­ate­ly know who I’m talk­ing about.

Any­way, Ms. Barbe appar­ent­ly had more in her reper­toire than “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up.” A lot more.

Above, we have her recit­ing the first 1,000 dig­its of Pi. The back­sto­ry remains unknown to us. We did some research and came up bone dry. If you know some­thing about the cir­cum­stances behind the record­ing, please let us know in the com­ments sec­tion below. To read along with a tran­script of the record­ing, just click here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hunter S. Thomp­son Calls Tech Sup­port, Unleash­es a Tirade Full of Fear and Loathing (NSFW)

Saul Bass Gives Ma Bell a Com­plete Makeover, 1969

The World’s First Mobile Phone Shown on 1922 Vin­tage Film

How Pi Was Near­ly Changed to 3.2 … and Copy­right­ed!

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How Vi Hart Makes Her Viral Videos: A Look Inside Her Creative Process

in Animation, Film, Math, Writing | May 15th, 2014

Spend some time pok­ing around on the Khan Acad­e­my, or this site for that mat­ter, and your chances of run­ning into math­e­mu­si­cian Vi Hart are extreme­ly favor­able. 

I’ve tried—and failed—to keep up with her high­ly digres­sive, rapid fire, doo­dle-based expla­na­tions on such top­ics as net neu­tral­i­ty and the space-time con­tin­u­um. I had bet­ter luck fol­low­ing her direc­tions for turn­ing squig­gles into snakes, a math-based par­lor trick that seems more like mag­ic to me.

What I real­ly want­ed to know is how does she make those fun­ny lit­tle videos of hers?  Doubt­less, any sev­en-year-old who’s logged two or three hours in an after-school pro­gram devot­ed to stop motion ani­ma­tion would have the chops to explain how to make sim­ple draw­ings ren­dered in Sharpie on a spi­ral bound note­book come to life, but what if I still did­n’t get it? I would­n’t want to give the short­ies the impres­sion that the lay­men and women of my gen­er­a­tion are too dim to keep up with mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy.

Then on a whim, I typed “how does Vi Hart make her videos” into a search engine and voila! The video above, in which the doyenne her­self reveals exact­ly how she does just that.

Actu­al­ly “exact­ly” might be over­stat­ing things a bit, giv­en that she does so in her imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able style. If I under­stand cor­rect­ly, she starts with a script, which she pares to the essen­tials, before shoot­ing the seg­ment with a team of interns, some of whom serve as body dou­bles for her hands, their arms encased in funky, detach­able sleeves. Then she speeds things up by delet­ing the frames in which the mov­ing hand obscures the page. I’m pret­ty sure she wings it when record­ing her voiceover nar­ra­tion, but I could be wrong.

She also seems to have a thing for pin­ning her long brown hair up with a turkey feath­er. Even so, I’ll bet the deci­sion to give her ador­ing pub­lic a glimpse of some­thing beyond mere hands cement­ed many a celebri­ty crush. She’s a Tina Fey for the geek set. (Not that Tina Fey isn’t already serv­ing that func­tion for the same demo­graph­ic.)

As win­some as she is, I have to say, I pre­ferred her 14-year-old intern Ethan Bres­nick’s con­sci­en­tious behind-the-scenes look at how these things come togeth­er. Have a look above if you’d like some straight dope on soft­ware, cam­era posi­tions, and the like.

(Depend­ing on how much work you’ve got to get done today, you may also enjoy the extreme­ly infor­mal, hour-plus inter­view Ethan con­duct­ed via Skype, dur­ing which Hart eats her din­ner and invites fans to join them via Twit­ter.)

The only thing lack­ing is the nit­ty grit­ty on how and where Hart stores her enor­mous video files. With­out a benev­o­lent Khan Acad­e­my to over­see my work, such tech­ni­cal specs would def­i­nite­ly come in handy for a begin­ner such as myself. The Sharpies on spi­ral bound I can fig­ure out on my own.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vi Hart Uses Her Video Mag­ic to Demys­ti­fy Stravin­sky and Schoenberg’s 12-Tone Com­po­si­tions

Vi Hart Explains & Defends Net Neu­tral­i­ty in a New Doo­dle-Filled Video

Math­e­mu­si­cian Vi Hart Explains the Space-Time Con­tin­u­um With a Music Box, Bach, and a Möbius Strip

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the author of sev­en books, a cou­ple of which have mor­phed into ebooks. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Beautiful Equations: Documentary Explores the Beauty of Einstein & Newton’s Great Equations

in Math, Science | April 1st, 2014

Like many right-brained peo­ple, artist and crit­ic Matt Collings finds high­er math mys­ti­fy­ing, a word that implies both bewil­der­ment and won­der. Faced with the equa­tions that make, for exam­ple, Stephen Hawking’s work pos­si­ble, most of us are left sim­i­lar­ly slack-jawed. Collings apt­ly describes the realm of the­o­ret­i­cal physics—which so con­tra­dicts our every­day experience—as “an alien world,” with its equa­tions like “incom­pre­hen­si­ble hiero­glyphs.” He decid­ed to enter this world, to “learn about some of the most impor­tant equa­tions in sci­ence.” His angle? He views them as art, “mas­ter­pieces” that “explain the world we live in.” Collings spends his hour-long BBC spe­cial Beau­ti­ful Equa­tions chat­ting with Stephen Hawk­ing and oth­er the­o­rists about such par­a­digm-shift­ing equa­tions as Einstein’s for­mu­la for spe­cial rel­a­tiv­i­ty and Newton’s laws of grav­i­ty.

In an era char­ac­ter­ized by sci­en­tists encroach­ing on the arts—to claim Mar­cel Proust as a neu­ro­sci­en­tist, Jane Austen as game the­o­rist—it’s refresh­ing to see a human­i­ties per­son engage the world of math, using the only schema he knows to make sense of what seems to him unin­tel­li­gi­ble. Unlike those sci­en­tists-turned-lit­er­ary crit­ics, Collings doesn’t make any large claims or assert exper­tise. He plays the hum­ble every­man, own­ing his igno­rance, his most endear­ing and effec­tive tool since it pro­vides the basis for his inter­locu­tors’ reme­di­al, and friend­ly, expla­na­tions. The results are an intel­li­gent primer for lay­folk, a refresh­er for the more knowl­edge­able, and per­haps an enter­tain­ing diver­sion for experts, who will like­ly have their quib­bles with Collings’ nec­es­sar­i­ly basic pre­sen­ta­tion. But he is not on the hunt for complexity—quite the oppo­site. As the title of the spe­cial indi­cates, Collings’ inquiry seeks to find out just what makes the work of New­ton, Ein­stein, and oth­ers so pro­found­ly, sim­ply ele­gant.

Aes­thet­ic feel­ing is not at all alien to math—far from it, in fact. As Bertrand Rus­sell famous­ly wrote in his essay “Mys­ti­cism and Log­ic”: “Math­e­mat­ics, right­ly viewed, pos­sess­es not only truth, but supreme beau­ty.” Rus­sel­l’s point has been empir­i­cal­ly val­i­dat­ed by recent neu­ro­science. As BBC.com report­ed in Feb­ru­ary, a study in the jour­nal Fron­tiers in Human Neu­ro­science found that in the brains of math­e­mati­cians, “the same emo­tion­al brain cen­tres used to appre­ci­ate art” are “acti­vat­ed by ‘beau­ti­ful’ maths.” While the con­cept of beau­ty itself may be impos­si­ble to quan­ti­fy, when it comes to equa­tions, sci­en­tists (or at least their brains) know it when they see it. The rest of us, like Collings, may require an appre­ci­a­tion course to under­stand the awe inspired by the math that, as our host puts it, so ele­gant­ly cap­tures the “enor­mi­ty of the uni­verse.”

You can find Beau­ti­ful Equa­tions list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries, part of our larg­er col­lec­tion of 675 Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Einstein’s Big Idea: E=mc²

Sev­en Ques­tions for Stephen Hawk­ing: What Would He Ask Albert Ein­stein & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How the Ancient Greeks Shaped Modern Mathematics: A Short, Animated Introduction

in Animation, Math | March 24th, 2014

If you think Ancient his­to­ry does­n’t mat­ter to your life today, think again. Cre­at­ed by The Roy­al Insti­tu­tion and the ani­ma­tion shop 12Foot6, this short ani­mat­ed video reminds us that the Greeks gave us some of the most basic con­cepts used in math­e­mat­ics — con­cepts that we still use to nav­i­gate our mod­ern world today. As with dra­ma and phi­los­o­phy, every­thing goes back to the Ancient Greeks.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is ‘100% Accu­rate’

Dis­cov­er the “Brazen Bull,” the Ancient Greek Tor­ture Machine That Dou­bled as a Musi­cal Instru­ment

Intro­duc­tion to Ancient Greece: A Free Online Course from Yale

Free Cours­es Online Math Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties

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