Mike Knee Maths

12/02/2024

One of the most fascinating videos by Derek Muller on the excellent Veritasium channel.

There's a strange number system, featured in the work of a dozen Fields Medalists, that helps solve problems that are intractable with real numbers. Head to...

04/01/2023

Happy New Year! At the risk of undermining my own work, this is quite funny...

A maths teacher is to apologise for defrauding the students he taught during the mid-1990s.

31/08/2022

CONGRATULATIONS to my handful of students who have done their maths GCSEs this year. All have met, and most have exceeded, their grade expectations, and one got a 7 from an expected 4 - it has to be said through lots of hard work! New slots this year are likely to be very limited but I shall remain open to enquiries.

04/09/2021

Recommendations and requests are coming in for the new school year, but I'm sorry to say I can't take on any new students this term, due to an upcoming house move. Many thanks to those who have supported and recommended me!

04/08/2021

A brief look at today's Olympic medal table shows that our (GB's) position of 5th looks a bit wrong - we're just pipped by Australia who have one more gold than us, but we have 18 silvers as against their 4. Back in 2012 I published an alternative scoring method whereby gold medals are worth 11 points, silver 5 and bronze 2 (see my blog for the reasoning - it wasn't my idea by the way). By that method we go up to 4th place, only marginally behind Japan.

From time to time, I plan to post an alternative version of the Olympic medal table. Conventionally countries are ranked by the number of g...

01/08/2021

Nice one...

Anna is a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland - in addition to her new accreditation of gold medal Olympian

17/07/2021

Recently I've been teaching the sine and cosine rules (or laws) for triangles and have been trying to think of ways to visualise them.
This page has two very clever ways to visualise these laws.

The sine law and cosine law are among the most useful formulas dealing with the triangle. For a long time, I treat them as formulas to be memorized by heart, to be pattern matched against figures w…

26/06/2021

I love the idea of this book. Anyone want to give it to me for Christmas? :-) :-)

Do Not Erase: Mathematicians and Their Chalkboards

10/06/2021

I'm pleased to say that I am now a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (FIMA).

17/03/2021

OK so this is easier than my previous post (about 4-letter words) but it is related (how?) This picture is about the "longest walkable road" in the world. As it's not really a single road, it has to mean "the longest walkable route" - but of course it's not, because you could always make it longer. It's (supposed here to be) the longest of all the shortest routes between two places. Cyclists in the UK will know about "LEJOG" aka Land's End to John O'Groats, which is a similar thing, the "longest shortest distance" (OK, so you could argue that "distance" implies making it as short as possible). This concept of "longest shortest", "max-min" etc. is remarkably important and powerful in maths.