Category: Mathematics

by Jerry Rhodes

Math is one of the subjects that make a lot of students struggle while in school. However, the math does not only challenge students, but it also puts a lot of parents in difficulty. Everyone knows that education doesn’t end in the classroom. Those parents who want the best from their child, know this very well. Therefore, parents along with teachers put a lot of efforts into coming with alternative solutions to stimulate children’s intelligence and prepare them for the future. On the other hand, technology continues to evolve, making teachers and parents think of solutions to put difficult subjects like math into a technological context. This is how the websites which help students with their math homework appeared.

11 Websites That Can Help with Math Homework

Math is Fun

Math is one of the subjects that make a lot of students struggle while in school. However, the math does not only challenge students, but it also puts a lot of parents in difficulty. Everyone knows that education doesn’t end in the classroom. Those parents who want the best from their child, know this very well. Therefore, parents along with teachers put a lot of efforts into coming with alternative solutions to stimulate children’s intelligence and prepare them for the future. On the other hand, technology continues to evolve, making teachers and parents think of solutions to put difficult subjects like math into a technological context. This is how the websites which help students with their math homework appeared.

11 Websites That Can Help with Math Homework

Math is Fun

Even though math is not always fun, this website tries to change student’s misconception about it. This website comes with simple math exercises to make children find the fun in math. On the other hand, whenever parents are in difficulty and they don’t know how to help their children, this is a good website to find the answers they need. On top of that, parents can use the tests and activities provided by the website to check whether their child has understood the material. The fun element comes also from engaging mathematical games and printable worksheets.

K-5 Math Teaching Resources

“Many parents and children love this game. It has a lot of games and activities connected to math and real-life events that no children can get bored when he browses this website. This is an excellent resource to help children understand better what he learned in class”, says Michaela Williams, writer at WowGrade.com. Students can choose from four categories of math exercises: geometry, data, measurement, and numbers. With just one single click, students up to 5^th grade can consolidate their math knowledge.

Learn Zillion

Visuals will always have a better impact than written text. When it comes to students and math, then videos are the best option to help children understand this subject better. There are various videos which will teach children more about various math strategies and help them get an A at math tests. This site is ideal for children from 2^nd grade and up.

BBC Bitesize

Everyone knows BBC as the national broadcaster which offers the latest news about the world. BBC did a step forward to come closer to their viewers and they created Bitesize to help both students and parents who are looking for free advice on math. David Williams, content director at Studicus.com, recommends Bitesize as “one of the most colorful websites offering online clips to help children love math like never before. Everything is easier and fun on Bitesize. What is more, the subjects are organized on various categories for English, Welsh, Northern Irish, and Scottish students”.

Primary Maths Arena

When math lessons are delivered in a fun game, then it becomes irresistible. Even though children finished their homework, they can still learn a bit more math during some fun games. Primary Maths Arena offers plenty of online games showing children that math can be a lot of fun. “Children will love this website as it comes with a lot of light and colors. Moreover, they can also play these games with other students in their network, making competition and games even more appealing. It is difficult to find another similar game which can sharpen the kids’ mind so much”, says Eleonor Dickens, editor at ProEssayService.com.

Khan Academy

Again, interactivity and visuals come into play. Khan Academy offers various videos and practical exercises to help children love math while learning at their own pace. The exercises’ difficulty varies. Therefore, there will be some which children will do on their own. But, there will be also others which push children’s limits and get out the best of them. Khan Academy website is recommended for children from kindergarten and up.

Cool Math

This is another website destroying the myth that math isn’t fun. The first element that catches students is its vivid colors and design. Moreover, it answers the questions for students of different ages. Starting from easy exercises to the most difficult ones, Cool Math covers a variety of subjects. For example, here students can practice pre-calculus, algebra, and many more.

NRICH

When it comes to expertise, NRICH is definitely one of the winners. Funded by a team of teachers from Cambridge, NRICH helps children do their math homework online, irrespective of their age or knowledge level. “This is one of the best websites to help children become highly skilled in math. Whenever they need help on their math homework, this is the website which will give them the answers they need. What is more, each answer comes together with a step-by-step explanation. Thus, it becomes easier for children to understand how he can find the solution to his problem”, says David Culson, marketing manager at EssaysDeluxe.com.

Doctor Genius

This website offers a lot of math practice for kids. It covers some of the most important math subjects for students in the 6^th grade. What is more, it allows students to choose their difficulty level. Therefore, those who are not very experienced can start with the beginner exercises. Once they start mastering the basic math concepts, they can move to the next difficulty level and so on.

XtraMath

Whenever parents get stuck in their children’s math homework, they can always take a look on XtraMath. It deals with the most basic concepts like adding, multiplying, or dividing. All the information is wrapped up in a set of video games which make math fun and engaging. The only competitor students race against is time and themselves. What is more, this website is preferred by most parents because it is not only effective but also free.

Cosmeo by Discovery Channel

Even though this is not a free website, it has plenty of exercise combinations which can make math a lot of fun. Students can find here a lot of videos and math tutorials. Thus, thanks to various multimedia elements, it will become easier for them to learn math and sharpen their attention and intelligence. Cosmeo successfully manages to keep children engaged and learn to have logical thinking thanks to its math exercises.

Any of the above eleven websites can be of true help for children. They don’t have to struggle with their math homework to start using some of the websites above. Students can use these websites to understand math concepts better and learn more than they are taught in class. On the other side, parents can use these tools to keep their children interested in math and stimulate their imagination. Finally, these websites offer solutions for children starting from kindergarten up to high school. Thus, they can become an excellent method to keep children entertained and develop organized and strategic thinking.

By Anupum Pant

Cutting a square off the center of a paper is easy. Jab a scissor into the paper and start cutting. But there’s an easier way. Fold it in half and you can do it in two turns, no jabbing required. Fold it two times and you need just two turns. Fold it thrice and you don’t need any turns at all. You then can just cut a straight line and you’ve got a square when you open it up. If you fold at the diagonal first, you won’t even have to do three folds to reach just one cut to get a square.

The most amazing thing about this is that there’s a theorem in mathematics about this which says, as long as a shape is made up of straight lines, there is always a way to fold it properly such that you get that shape with a single straight cut.

As long as you avoid curvy letters, you can do this for every letter in the English alphabet. Here’s an example…

By Anupum Pant

Online dating is a serious game these days. For any success of finding a mate online, Hannah Fry a lecturer in the mathematics of cities at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, has some really useful tips to share. Remember, all of these are backed by real math. Here is a quick rundown of the 3 most important points you should keep in mind if you are trying to find a partner online.

1. Be yourself. Turns out, trying to hide the ugly parts of yourself, you actually decrease your odds of receiving more messages. Counterintuitive, by completely backed by math.

2. According to optimal stopping theory, the math says that in the first 37% of your dating window, you should reject everybody for long-term relations. And when you are done with that, you should choose the next person that you think is better than everyone else you’ve dated before.

3. No compromise. Since 1 in two marriages fail, to avoid a marital breakup, it’s often mathematically
equivalent to see an argument between couples as an arms race. At least, the same equations are valid here too. Couples which spiral into a series of negativities are more prone to divorce than the couples who have bouts of positivity during arguments. So successful couples are the ones who do not let resentment built with time by having compromises. The ones who do not let anything unnoticed and allow each other to complain about everything.

By Anupum Pant

If you take the plot of y=1/x and plot it from 1 to infinity, you’ll see that the plot seems to never meet the x axis. Now, take this plot and spin it fast with the x axis as the axis of rotation. You’ll then have a horn shaped solid object which is endlessly long. A mathematical object also known as the Gabriel;s horn or Torricelli’s trumpet.

Mathematically, this object is interesting because it can contain a finite amount of volume, but it’s surface area is infinite. That is to say, you can fill the horn/trumpet with a finite amount of paint, yet the whole paint it contains would not be enough to paint the inside surface of the object – known as the painter’s paradox. However, there’s a catch about painting the inner part of this horn. As WIkipedia puts it.

In fact, in a theoretical mathematical sense, a finite amount of paint can coat an infinite area, provided the thickness of the coat becomes vanishingly small “quickly enough” to compensate for the ever-expanding area, which in this case is forced to happen to an inner-surface coat as the horn narrows. However, to coat the outer surface of the horn with a constant thickness of paint, no matter how thin, would require an infinite amount of paint.

By Anupum Pant

When Godtfred Kirk Christiansen was the third son of Ole Kirk Christiansen, the founder of LEGO went to the patent office to get a patent for lego blocks, he was asked a question by the patent officer to which he had no good answer. He only had an estimate. The question was – “How many combinations can 6 of the lego blocks be used to make different compound objects.”

He said he had calculated a number which was close to 102,981,000 combinations. He wasn’t quite right.
The question was so hard, that it took years to get to the exact answer. Soren Eilers, a professor of Mathematics at the University of Copenhagen put his mind to work and figured out the answer. In fact, his mind did not do him much service here. It was a computer which spit out the answer to him after a week long calculation.
He found that the actual answer to this mathematical conundrum is – 915,103,765

His computer can now calculate this number in a matter of minutes. But as you increase the number of blocks, the time needed to arrive at the answer increases hundred folds. So, the number of combinations from 7 blocks takes 2 hours. 8 blocks – around 20 days. But calculating the same for 9 blocks might take hundreds of years.

By Anupum Pant

In the summer of 2007, Jeremy Harper, a software professional took some time off his work to be at home and count to a million for a good cause. Once this started, for 3 long months, counting for 16 hours a day, he kept doing this. While he was doing this, he streamed his performance live over the internet on a website where anyone could see him and donate to the charity for which he was doing this.

By the end of it he was able to raise $10,000 for a charity Push America. He ended up getting his name etched in the guiness book of world records for the largest number ever counted. His record still remains.

By Anupum Pant

Everyone knows a circle. Consider a circle and think about its center for a minute. Now, imagine that the center of the circle actually has another center below it, overlapping. The interesting thing about a circular pool table would be that if you kept a ball in the center and hit it, it would come back to the center, no matter where you hit on the table’s edge. (Assuming perfect physics is happening on that table)

Now imagine these centers are pulled apart. You have an ellipse. A figure that’s more or less a circle with two centers separated by some distance. If a pool table was shaped that way and you hit a ball kept at one of the centers, the ball would bounce back from the edge, no matter where you hit, and go back to not the initial center, it would go back to the other center. Each of these center is called a focus of an ellipse. Don’t call them centers when your mathematician friend is around, you’ll put yourself in unnecessary danger.

Only if pool tables like these could exist, so thought the mathematician too and actually made it. Here’s the demonstration…

By Anupum Pant

An interesting way to subtract numbers by minute physics tells you that you can actually add numbers to get the answer that you would otherwise, by subtracting!

By Anupum Pant

Turns out calculating pi in your own kitchen isn’t very difficult either. Of course you don’t get an extremely accurate value of pi, you still will end up with a good approximation considering how simple the process is. You’ll need a couple of sausages and coloured tape. Or you could even use matchsticks if that’s more appropriate.

By Anupum Pant

The Higgs Boson, first predicted by Professor Peter Higgs and five other physicists is an elementary particle that explains why other particles in the universe have mass. After having spent billions of dollars and what not, scientists were able to discover a solid proof of the existence of such a particle in 2013. But much before scientists had predicted the mass of it, Homer Simpson came very close to it. And this was about more than ten years before scientists.

Homer writes an equation on the chalk board in the episode “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace” which was aired in the year 1998. If you solve this equation, you get an answer which is only slightly larger than the actual higgs boson’s mass – as Simon singh pointed out in his book, “The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets.”

Now, everyone’s going crazy about how Homer did it isn’t actually thinking straight. This is as simple as seeing that the equation being written on the board by Homer Simpson, was actually written by writers of the show. We’ve seen writers like Ken Keeler hiding deep meanings, especially related to numbers in the past. You should know that he was also a writer for this show for a year before this episode was aired.

What I think is that there was some hidden genius hiding behind the veil here. It can’t be just a coincidence.

via [io9]

By Anupum Pant

In terms of how long mathematics has been around, transcendental numbers is a relatively new discovery. Most of the time we’ve been familiar with only algebraic numbers. But these are a universe apart. And it should be interesting to you that these numbers are the ones which cover most of your number line.

These numbers are real, and yet cannot be the solutions of an algebraic polynomial equation whose coefficients are all integers. All of them are irrational, but not all irrational are transcendental. For instance, square root of two is irrational, but not transcendental.

The most common examples of transcendental numbers are ‘pi’ and ‘e’ whose approximate values are 3.14159 and 2.7182 respectively. Their actual value can never be listed, only can be represented.

Numberphile explains…

By Anupum Pant

Dots and boxes is a great game to play, like tic-tac-toe I’d say. But, thanks to the smartphone and computer revolution, not many would agree that playing games on paper with someone real sitting physically next to you could actually be fun. Anyway, winning it all the time is more fun. And for awesci readers, and numberphile subscribers, it’s going to be possible to win every time at dots and boxes now on…
Well, if you don’t know how to play it, then this would be a great start at an actual social game. Also it’d be great because you’d win the day you start learning something. Just wish that your opponent isn’t an avid awesci visitor.
Elwyn Berlekamp explains how…