More Curations
Featured in Star Trek and in a music video, this Toronto house was home to James Stewart, the author of the most famous Calculus textbook and one of the first openly gay mathematicians.
Inspired by his love of math, he designed the house to include both curves and a large and flexible performing space, and named it after this operation:
The Integral
Sketch the missing pictures
Judged by Ms Siedman
Sofia Kovalevskaya grew up around calculus: literally.
Her family couldn't afford wallpaper and covered her nursery walls with a professor's lecture notes on derivative calculus. Years later her tutor was amazed by how quickly she picked up the concepts, and as her memories flashbacked she said "the concept of limit appeared to me as an old friend.”
So it might be no surprise that she won the Paris Academy's Grand Prix for solving a problem in Nonlinear Dynamics, a branch of Calculus that famously bested Isaac Newton.
In particular, this problem, known as the "mathematical mermaid or water nymph" studied how to model spinning objects like tops. It can also be used to model the motion of which Winter Olympic sport?
Figure Skating
"small stone" (Newton died by bladder stones and Leibniz died by Kidney stones)
The Good Will Hunting Problem is part of graph theory, a branch of math that focuses on vertex networks connected by edges.
The problem asks about a class of graphs that have no cycles, which are named after this organism:
Tree Graph
This graph is known as the "Devil's Staircase."
It's created by dividing a line from 0 to 1 into thirds and flattening the middle third. Then, you break the surrounding segments into thirds and flatten the middle one again. And then you just keep dividing and flattening.
Since the function is flat almost everywhere, it's derivative is almost always ______, even though the function is continuous and increasing, which has challenged mathematicians' understanding of Calculus.
0
Each year, the AWM awards a cash prize for student essays that conduct biographies of contemporary women mathematicians and statisticians who work at universities, in industries, or in the government.
What does AWM stand for?
Association for Women in Mathematics
Who said this:
"6accdae13eff7i3l9n4o4qrr4s8t12ux"
Isaac Newton, to Leibniz, bragging that he'd discovered the Fundamental Theorem Calculus (he didn't know Leibniz also knew it)
Calculus played a life-saving role in changing how doctors approached THIS VIRUS.
Prior to the mathematicians' analysis, doctors assumed it was better for patients to save their strength until the virus had passed its hibernation stage before beginning treatment; but, by using Diff EQs, mathematicians calculated that during the virus' 'hibernation' the immune system and bloodstream cleared a 10 BILLION virus particles a day, depleting patient energy. They also calculated that once infected, these infected cells only last 2 days, while the virus itself was mutating, resulting in rapid patient deaths, especially if only treated with 1 drug by itself.
As a result, the mathematicians suggested using a combination of 3 drugs to fight the mutations and were able to recommend doses that dropped viral load by 200-fold in 2 weeks.
HIV
What is Ms. Siedman's favorite number?
12
This is Gabriel's horn. It's produced by rotating the curve y=(1/x) around the x-axis.
You can fill Gabriel's horn with paint, yet you can never paint its walls. What does this mean in math language?
It has finite volume (you can filled it with paint),
but infinite surface area (you can't paint its walls)
Which Manhattan neighborhood would you go to for your visit?
Chelsea
(Flatiron also accepted)
When Napoleon set out a challenge to make mathematical sense of Chladni figures, the only person to enter the contest was Sophie Germain, but Chladni still gets the name. This wasn't the first time a man was better known than Germain, she attended school by impersonating a man "M. Le ____" (a word meaning a color in French)
Blanc
Which foreign countries has Ms Siedman lived in? (Bonus points if you can get multiple)
Bulgaria, Georgia
In topology, this shape is known as a Torus. Mathematically it is equivalent to all of the following EXCEPT:
a) a donut
b) a coffee cup
c) a game of pac-man
d) a classic pretzel
d) a classic pretzel
For Toy Story 5, Pixar recently developed a new way of animating hair described by Thomas Jordan here:
"Each curl knows the others, so they can ricochet and collide with each other, in addition to interacting better with Blaze's shoulders and clothes"
Which extension of Calculus from our unit does this sound most similar to?
This is most similar to the Day 2 of R&J where R and J's feeling depend both on the interactions and reactions between themselves and each other
Known in some Calc classes as "Catherine’s Rose," this visual proof demonstrates which mathematical statement?
Sigma{1,n}x^i=1
This well-known mathematician used calculus to predict the position of a moving spacecraft as it orbited the Earth and to calculate its trajectory for successful reentry into the atmosphere.
To do that, they needed to include complications that Newton had left out: especially his false assumption that the earth was sphere.
Katherine Johnson
This is the Weierstrass function, a fractal function that is continuous everyone, but paradoxically cannot be ________ (past tense word for a famous Calculus operation)
Differentiated
Even
Using Calculus, mathematicians have determined an "Optimal Stopping" algorithm that tells us when we should stop searching for things like apartments, candidates for a job, and even romantic partners, and just cut our losses and settle for the one in front of us.
Without knowing anything about what the apartment, candidate, or partner is like, and just knowing how they compare to the ones before them, the algorithm is able to find the best option XX% of the time.
37%
This cash prize for compelling student math communication projects (blogs, podcasts, artwork, TikTok videos, podcasts, songs, musings…) is named after a mathematician who also created the Romeo & Juliet problem, has starred in a Netflix movie, and written many books on Calculus and other math topics
Steve Jobs said "There are more PhDs working on this film than any other in movie history" about this 1995 movie, which was the 1st entirely computer-animated feature film.
The graphics for the movie were created by polygon surface subdivision approximations and would take an animator a week to synch an 8-second shot.
Toy Story
When this former US President left politics, he famously said “I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier."
And he meant it: he was so devoted to Newton, he even got a copy of Newton's death mask––a plastered replica of Newton's face made when he died.
Thomas Jefferson
(That's what you missed)
AI algorithms, computer graphics and gaming, search engines and cryptography, engineering, and some parts of economics all require using _______, an organized grid of different data points studied in Linear Algebra. They were also the inspiration for a famous 1999 movie about society.
Matrices