PRIZE WINNERS - SIXTH INTRA SCHOOL MATHEMATICS OLYMPIAD

Dear Reader,

CRPF Public School has fulfilled its motto of striving towards excellence by organizing and successfully completing its Sixth
Intra School Mathematics Olympiad on 6 November 2015. Around 250 students enthusiastically participated in the Olympiad held in school premises.

Hopefully, it was a great learning experience for all. It surely provided an extended platform for all the participating students and it is wished that it is utilized to its fullest.

Check out the result here:

VI-VIII RANK HOLDERS

IX - XII RANK HOLDERS

VI-XII MERIT HOLDERS

Congratulations to all the rank and merit holders for their brilliant performance in the Olympiad.

You may again like to see the question papers and their solution

5 Reasons Why Math Matters

Dear Reader,

Math is important. It really is.

Despite how you felt about algebra class or geometry class or even basic addition and subtraction, math is a life skill that applies to everyone, not just accountants and engineers. It is the language of many fields, some of which may surprise you. But math matters, in more ways than one. And while numbers and equations are a necessary evil to some and pure enjoyment to others, we need math to live.

Below are five reasons why math is worth knowing. Starting with…

Building Stuff: Balancing a cheque-book? Dividing rent among four roommates? Determining your share of the electric bill? How about taxes and student loans? Paying bills is the worst, no doubt about it. But you need to know some math in order to stay on top of your finances, balance your budget, and avoid all those overdrafts.

Cooking: Surprised? Baking cupcakes and roasting a chicken requires math skills. You need to measure the ingredients in terms of teaspoon, tablespoon, ounces, grams, kilograms, etc. And what if you what to cut a recipe in half? This is serious business. Unless you’re a pro at eyeballing the “this much salt” and “that much flour,” you need math in the kitchen.

Travel: Planning to jump the pond for a backpacking adventure? If so, better prepare yourself for currency confusion, especially if your currency converter is not a physical device. Knowledge of currency conversion is essential when traveling to a foreign country. Your iPhone may not be able to save you, but your math skills sure can.

Building Stuff: There will come a time when you need to assemble a desk, a shelving unit, or perhaps a crib. And you’ll thank your math teacher for helping you become the hero that you are once that desk sits proudly constructed by the window. Putting stuff together requires math aptitude in order to avoid a safety hazard.

Career Readiness: Are you thinking of becoming a nurse? How about a marketing manager or a lawyer? Nurses use math to calculate medication dosages, marketing managers use math to determine profit margin and pricing strategies, and lawyers use math to determine settlements and statistical evidence. Even sports agents and high school English teachers use math on a regular basis.

Think about it. Math really is everywhere. From the kitchen to the courtroom, numbers, graphs, and measurements are all around us. Knowing how to calculate a tip at a restaurant or your fantasy football score is important business! Mortgage payments, caloric intake, and retail discounts are a big part of our everyday lives. And we can’t always rely on our phones to do the work for us when it comes to math. Your brain is a much better, and more reliable tool.

Source: http://onlinemathdegrees.org/

Believe it or not in Mathematics

1. Russian King Peter the Great announced that no member of the Royal Family should marry until they pass in arithmetic, geometry and navigation.

2. There is no equilateral triangle, the coordinates of whose vertices are all integers.

3. There are only five Heronian triangles (triangles having integer sides) such that the perimeter is equal to the area. They are: (5, 12, 13) , (6, 8, 10) , (6, 25, 29) , (7, 15, 20) and (9, 10, 17). The first two triangles are right triangles also.

4. A plane can be filled with squares, equilateral triangles and regular hexagons. No other regular polygons can fill the plane without gaps.

5. Three legged stool is more stable than any other stool. The principle underlying is this fact is we can draw only one circle through three given points which are not collinear. That is why old people walk with the assistance of a stick (third leg) , or even think of tripod.

6. An angle of 3 degrees is the only constructible angle of prime measure.

7. The average human body contains about 10^27 atoms whereas the number of atoms in the whole universe is 10^73.

8. There are certainly at least two peoples in the world with exactly the same number of hairs on their heads! (There are more people than the hairs on any one head).

Sixth Intra School Mathematics Olympiad - Solution Key

Dear All,

Mathematics, often called as language of nature has become an integral part of everyone’s life. In today's highly competitive world, one has to bear a lot of mental stress and also have to get involved in so many things in order to acquire knowledge. This is where co-scholastic activities play a very significant role. They provide the much needed exposure for a student.

CRPF Public School has fulfilled its motto of striving towards excellence by organizing and successfully completing its Fifth Intra School Mathematics Olympiad on 6 November 2015. Around 250 students enthusiastically participated in the Olympiad held in school premises.

Such Olympiads and events provide a great and extended platform for the students to nurture and showcase their ability and talent. It was a towering learning experience for the students of the school from class VI to XII. To encourage students, merit certificates will be given to those scoring at least 60% along with the normal prizes for the top scorers.

We hope that all the participating students must have done well in the exam. To access your performance, check out the solution keys of the question papers below:-

Question papers:-

Class VI      Class VII     Class VIII

Class IX      Class X        Class XI     Class XII

Solutions keys:-

Class VI      Class VII     Class VIII

Class IX      Class X        Class XI      Class XII

The result would be declared on 20 November 2015 and would be available here on the blog.

Wishing you all the best!!!

Ramanujan surprises again

A box of manuscripts and three notebooks. That's all that's left of the work of Srinivasa Ramanujan, an Indian mathematician who lived his remarkable but short life around the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet, that small stash of mathematical legacy still yields surprises. Two mathematicians of Emory University, Ken Ono and Sarah Trebat-Leder, have recently a made a fascinating discovery within its yellowed pages. It shows that Ramanujan was further ahead of his time than anyone had expected, and provides a beautiful link between several milestones in the history of mathematics. And it all goes back to the innocuous-looking number 1729.

Ramanujan's story is as inspiring as it is tragic. Born in 1887 in a small village around 400 km from Madras (now Chennai), Ramanujan developed a passion for mathematics at a young age, but had to pursue it mostly alone and in poverty. Until, in 1913, he decided to write a letter to the famous Cambridge number theorist G.H. Hardy. Accustomed to this early form of spam, Hardy might have been forgiven for dispatching the highly unorthodox letter straight to the bin. But he didn't. Recognising the author's genius, Hardy invited Ramanujan to Cambridge, where he arrived in 1914. Over the following years, Ramanujan more than repaid Hardy's faith in his talent, but suffered ill health due, in part, to the grizzly English climate and food. Ramanujan returned to India in 1919, still feeble, and died the following year, aged only 32. Hardy later described his collaboration with Ramanujan as "the one romantic incident in my life".

To read complete article, click here.

Source: https://plus.maths.org/content/ramanujan

Who is George Boole and why has Google made a doodle on him?

George Boole (2 November 1815 – 8 December 1864) , the British mathematician whose work on logic laid many of the foundations for the digital revolution, has been honoured on the 200th anniversary of his birth with a special Google Doodle.

He was an English mathematician, educator, philosopher and logician. He worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, and is best known as the author of The Laws of Thought which contains Boolean algebra. Boolean logic is credited with laying the foundations for the information age.

George Boole was the son of a shopkeeper. This working class of people was not given a high level of education. He had common schooling and a commercial course. His father, who had studied some mathematics privately, tutored George in the subject.

George wanted to learn Latin and Greek so that he could advance in society. He was given some basic tutoring from the local bookseller, a friend of his father. George managed to learn Latin by himself. At the age of 12, he translated an ode of Horace into English. His father was proud and had his work printed in the local paper. Several critics denied a boy of his age could do such work, but they also pointed out his errors. George was humiliated.

George spent the next two years studying Latin and Greek. At the age of 16 he was ready to find a profession that would allow him to support his aging parents. Boole worked as an assistant teacher at two schools over the next four years. He was not satisfied with the low wages and looked for another profession. He could not afford the Army or the Law, and he didn't like the teacher's wages, so he focused on the Church.

After four years of preparation to be a clergyman, his parents persuaded him back to teaching. He did learn French, German and Italian while studying to become a clergyman, languages that would help him later in mathematics.

At age 20, George Boole opened his own school. He had to begin teaching mathematics to his pupils, which sparked his own interest in math. Dissatisfied with the textbooks, he began reading Laplace and Lagrange for ideas. Inspired by ideas in their work, he wrote his first mathematical paper on the calculus of variations. During this time, Boole also discovered invariants.

Boole began submitting his work to the Cambridge Mathematical Journal. The editor, Duncan Gregory liked his papers and published them in the journal. Gregory suggested that Boole study at Cambridge, but he could not quit teaching because he supported his parents financially.

Boole began studying algebra as Gregory suggested. His work was soon published and awarded. In August 1849, Boole was appointed as a professor of mathematics at Queens College, Cork. Within two years, he was named Dean of Science.

In 1854, Boole published An Investigation into the Laws of Thought, on Which are founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. Boole suggested that logic and algebraic symbols were similar. By tying logic and algebra, Boole allowed algebra to be viewed as purely abstract. Today, computer programming is based upon Boolean algebra.

George Boole married Mary Everest (daughter of George Everest, for whom the mountain is named) in 1855. Boole encouraged his wife to study at the college. They had five daughters.

George Boole died on December 8, 1864, after several weeks of fighting a lung infection. George had walked to college in the rain, lectured, and returned home which prompted the sickness.

George Boole's contributions to mathematics have very modern applications: computer programming, electrical engineering, satellite pictures, telephone circuits and even Einstein's theory of relativity.

His legacy was Boolean logic, a theory of mathematics in which all variables are either "true" or "false", or "on" or "off". The theory proceeded the digital age, with American Claude Shannon applying Boolean logic to build the electrical circuits in the 1930s that led to modern computers.