If you liked the Fun Fact Multiplication by 11, you’ll enjoy seeing how to take that idea one step farther. Here’s...
Continue reading...medium
These fun facts are at the medium level.
i to the i is a Real Number
If you are familiar with complex numbers, the “imaginary” number i has the property that the square of i is -1....
Continue reading...Face Derivatives and Computer Vision
One challenge in robotics is the problem of computer vision: how do you program a computer to interpret and “understand”...
Continue reading...Square Root of Two is Irrational
An irrational number is a number that cannot be expressed as a fraction. But are there any irrational numbers? It was known to...
Continue reading...Finding the N-th digit of Pi
Here is a very interesting formula for pi, discovered by David Bailey, Peter Borwein, and Simon Plouffe in 1995:Pi =...
Continue reading...Ellipsoidal Paths
Given an ellipse, and a smaller ellipse strictly inside it, start at a point on the outer ellipse, and in a...
Continue reading...Large Counterexample
A positive integer is said to be of even type if its factorization into primes has an even number of primes. Otherwise it is...
Continue reading...Whiffle Ball
Does a ball take longer to come down than go up, or does it take the same amount of time...
Continue reading...Area of a Circle or Regular Polygon
There’s a nice way to see why the formula for the area of a circle of radius R is: Pi...
Continue reading...Pretzel Unlinking
Imagine that each of the ropes in the two sets of links in Figure 1 are solid (with thickness) and...
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