Ask Math Anything Topics from March 2020
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3/16/20 Live stream topics
- Sum of the terms of the Zeta Fucntion:
- as a repeating decimal
- What's the cube root of ? (There are three of them!)
- Finding roots of quadratic equations by factoring, graphing them in the complex plane
- Graphing quadratics like
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3/17/20 Live stream topics
- How can we generate true randomness?
- The relation of the sides of a triangle whose angles are in an arithmetic progression to the Law of Sines
- Side lengths of a triangle
- Modeling the spread of coronavirus with a graph (each person infects 2 people
- Why should we study algebra?
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3/18/20 Live stream topics
- Does infinity solve
- How many 10-digit numbers have digits summing to 5?
- Stars and bars
- Pascal's Triangle and powers of
- Squaring four-digit numbers
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Thu 3/19/20 Live stream topics
- Simon's Favorite Factoring Trick
- Zeno's Paradox
- Sum of the terms of the sequence
- Monty Hall Problem (sort of )
- Simplify
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Fri 3/20/20 Live stream topics
- Golden ratio and how it applies to A4 / A3 paper
- Flying around the earth in a plane, and how you can get a triangle with three right angles
- Ratios of music notes are nice fractions approaching the golden ratio
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Sat 3/21/20 Live stream topics
- A math question about houses, sidewalks, and driveways
- "Are you rich?"
- Should I learn algebra or pre-calculus?
- How to study math at home
- How long should I spend on math per day?
- Which competitions should I do?
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Mon 3/23/20 Live stream topics
- Solve and using the quadratic method trick
- equals what?
- equals what?
- Euler's Identity (The "most beautiful equation in math")
- (zero factorial)
- Using to describe factorial
- The number of diagonals in an -sided polygon
- Why are there ten digits? (And more about the base-10 system)
- Babylonians and how they used base 60
- Mental math: (Difference of squares)
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Tue 3/24/20 Live stream topics
- Solving
- Shoelace Theorem!
- Matrix multiplication and determinants
- What is a mod? (modulo)
- What's the purpose of slope? (And usage of the term "grade")
- What percent of people in the world will get coronavirus?
- Talking about infinity
- Can you briefly talk about calculus?
- What's a Riemann Sum?
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Wed 3/25/20 Live stream topics
- Business math: investing in different ways
- Power of a Point Theorem (geometry)
- Troll Paradox
- Explain using a -degree line like exponential growth and the slope of
- Is exponential growth like the spread of coronavirus?
- How was your first MATHCOUNTS competition?
- Fractional exponents
- Mental Math: and why we can't do this trick with
- Do you like science?
- Pythagorean Theorem (briefly)
- The second most beautiful equation in math
- Combustion
- Why can xenon form compounds if it is a noble gas?
- How to view multiple dimensions
- What is the inverse function of an exponential function?
- The inverse of is
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Thu 3/26/20 Live stream topics
- How to think about statistics -- look at data and figure out what's the likelihood that something is true underneath it
- Probability of flipping a coin twice
- World with three types of coins: TT, HT, HH... What is the chance that someone has a certain type of coin given that it flips a H?
- Conditional probability: If someone gets HHHHHH, what is the chance that they had HH?
- Seeing what happens when we filter out the blue color in the green screen
- Surface area of a sphere and its relationship to volume (why is there a factor of 3?)
- Volume of a pyramid is of its bounding box
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Fri 3/27/20 Live stream topics
- Negation and reciprocals
- Logarithms
- Squirting "square rooting"
- Exponentiation:
- Log (in base 2) of 32 equals 5
- Why do people ruin math?
- How to find the volume of a green shirt: spray foam all around the shirt and place it in a bathtub (Archimedes and the volume of gold)
- Pompeii
- Coin flip conundrum (The first person wins if he gets HH; the second person wins if he gets HT. Who wins?)
- Which martini glass is half full? (Prof. Loh's favorite paradox.)
- Units of density: Why is there a unit called "cc"? What's the density of water?
- What's the volume of the earth? How many time zones are there on Earth?
- Fermi problems
- Trick for squaring numbers ending in
- What's the surface area of the Earth?
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Sat 3/28/20 Live stream topics
- How long will coronavirus be here?
- Adidas or Nike?
- Why is NYC the epicenter of the virus?
- Math or Science?
- How can we stop climate change?
- Is the whole world a simulation?
- Tips on how to play your games
- Is your favorite color blue?
- What's your university teacher like?
- What's your favorite subject?
- Can you do a British accent?
- Can you get your crush to like you with math?
- Can you hack my school computer for me?
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Mon 3/30/20 Live stream topics
- Delivering papers on a route (Nodes all have an odd number of routes coming out)
- Bridges of Konigsberg problem
- What class should you take after finishing all high school classes?
- How to calculate the mass of the Earth (Fermi problems)
- The volume of Earth is times
- Mass of the Sun, Mass of the Earth
- Use gravity to find the density of the Sun
- What are the last three digits of
- How to prepare for the AMC 8
- What's the range of
- How many ways are there to figure out Fibonacci numbers?
- Do you like cheese?
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Tue 3/31/20 Live stream topics
- What does mean?
- How to solve a three-variable equation efficiently
- Gaussian Elimination
- How not to make silly mistakes
- Terabytes, gigabytes, megabytes
- Why do we not use the metric system?
- Why do you teach at CMU and not at a math school?
- How to convert spherical to rectangular coordinates
- What is the importance of Earth's tilt?
- How do you prove that the Earth is round?