Ask Math Anything Topics from April 2020
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4/8/20
- Chess ratings
- Three logicians go into a restaurant...
- What do you like to eat?
- Sine and multiplicative inverses
- The NOVID app
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4/9/20
- Converting from celsius to fahrenheit
- Combinatorical game theory
- NOVID
- How many hours did you do math for when you were a toddler or a child?
- Why do you like people?
- Pigeonhole Principle and why phone numbers have 7 digits
- What sparked the idea for you to give speeches around the world for math?
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4/10/20
- Can you say a math joke?
- Why is math either too hard or too easy?
- Do you have an AoPS account?
- What did you do in your free time before coronavirus?
- The missing dollar trick
- Which is harder, AMC or MATHCOUNTS?
- Which website should I use for math?
- What are different types of classes and which do you prefer?
- Does \( \sum_{n =1}^{\infty} \frac{k}{1 + k^2} \) converge? If so, then to what value?
- Does \( \sum \frac{1}{n^2}\) converge?
- How many different iPhone passwords are possible?
- Why is a 2-digit password not so good?
- Show that \( p^2 -1\) is factorable by \(24\) if \(p \geq 5\)
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Sat 4/11/20 Live stream topics
- How do you do math without staring at a screen or paper?
- How can we get a good future?
- How do you deal with rejection and failure?
- How can a satellite go as fast as the Earth?
- Will we ever blow up the moon?
- Do you think COVID will end the world?
- How can we motivate ourselves?
- Thoughts about AI
- How do mathematicians make money?
- How many times do you go grocery shopping a week?
- How to switch interest from English to math
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4/18/20
- Arthur Benjamin
- Do you play an instrument?
- How did you get into Caltech?
- What keyboard do you use?
- Was your dream job always math?
- How to tell parents that grades are not the most important thing
- How to encourage my son to love math?
- How to get my mom to love math?
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Mon 4/20/20
- Simple derivatives using the example of the sequence \(2, 10, 30, 68, 130 \text{ } (2n^2 + n)\)
- How to find a formula besides finding a pattern
- How much gas does it take to go around the F1 2019 track once
- How are cereal boxes made?
- What does bluetooth have to do with math?
- How to use Prof. Loh's dice against your friends
- How to protect computers from coronavirus
- Which digit is more important, 1 or 0?
- How is math used in sports?
- What is \(\sqrt{6 \sqrt{ 6 \sqrt{ 6 \sqrt{6 \ldots }}}} \) ?
- What is the square root of \(i?\)
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Tue 4/21/20 Live stream topics
- Prove why time multiplied by speed equals distance
- Bob the unpredictable cat walks on a 1 mile racetrack at 1 mph. Is it possible to calculate how long it will take him to do 1 lap?
- Converting units
- Standard deviation and calculating the spread of the normal hump ( \( \sqrt{n \times 0.5 \times 0.5}\))
- Cube root of \(i\)
- Are there any math tournaments or shows that you recommend?
- What is the probability that a coin will land on its side?
- Why is the economy going down?
- If every person that each of us told someone about this livestream, and each of those people tell one person, and each of those people tell one person, and so on, how many people should each of us tell in order to get 10,000 people here?
- If the IMO questions are getting harder gradually throughout the years do you think that the value/weight of an older IMO medal is less?
- Where are you filming this stream from?
- Are you lonely?
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Wed 4/22/20 Live stream topics
- Is there a strategy for rock paper scissors, or is it just a random game?
- Who is the smartest person in the world?
- What is the most mathematical board game?
- Which square in Monopoly is the most commonly landed on?
- How is a random number generator really random?
- Strategy for winning tic-tac-toe
- Solve \( \sqrt{-x} = -1 \)
- How to win money on the lottery
- Prove that \( \pi = 4 \) using Minecraft / pixel art analogy
- How do real-time games sync so well, even when a player(s) have high ping, and are far away? Why do movies take so much longer to load in comparison?
- How does a computer program synchronize time?
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Thu 4/23/20 Live stream topics
- What is the units digit of \( 2^{859}?\)
- How does noise cancelling work?
- How many street names are there?
- What happens if the Earth stops spinning?
- What is the chance that the virus goes away before the school year starts?
- How to win at \(4 \times 4\) tic-tac-toe
- Perfect information games
- Game tree
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Mon 4/27/20 Live stream topics
- Hex codes and binary
- \(15\) in base \(2\)
- \(10110110 \times 2\) in binary
- Sound waves are stored in a 16-bit format
- What's the largest 16-bit integer? (15 ones, \( 11111 11111 11111 = 2^{15} - 1\)
- How much money is there in the world?
- How can I not get glasses even though I'm staring at a screen every day?
- How can you use math to aim in a game?
- How to get an isosceles triangle (if projectile is the same speed as the runner)
- Circle of Apollonius
- Why is airplane food so bad?
- Which temperature is the same whether it's in celsius or fahrenheit?
- How common is my birthday?
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Tue 4/28/20 Live stream topics
- A game where two people take turns choosing numbers. The first person to get three of their numbers adding to 15 wins
- Does coding help with math?
- Finding the area of a nautilus shell using Fibonacci numbers
- How many prime numbers are there from 0 to your age?
- How can you figure out how many prime numbers there are between 2 and 2500 in a fast way?
- Ramanujan's numbers, and the sum of two cubes in two ways
- Sieve of Erastothenes
- Do you believe that the UFO sighted by Air Force fighters is real?
- If one stays in the sky, after 12 hours, can he get to the other side of the world?
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Wed 4/29/20 Live stream topics
- What are the uses of ratios? "I think they're useless and don't make sense."
- Sound wave graph of a microphone
- Signal-to-noise ratios
- What does the opposite of noise sound like?
- How to remove a fear of math
- How to predict when the volcano on Hawaii will erupt
- Do math professors or math majors have a friendly rivalry with other majors?
- How do you determine the last two digits of \(2^{2020}?\)
- Why do math contests always use the current year in their problems?
- What is the remainder when we divide \( 3^{703}\) by \(80?\)
- What does it take to get into the U.S. national math olympiad team?
- What to do to prepare for math contests
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Thu 4/30/20 Live stream topics
- How do we know \( \pi\) is real?
- How to calculate \( \pi\) using division
- If you have a certain number of numbers that add up to a certain number, can you calculate the average biggest number?
- Gamma function
- Can every 2-D geometry question be solved by 3-D geometry?
- Do you believe in aliens?
- Suppose that 20% of a number is 17. Find 20% of 17% of the number.
- Can something be 1 dimension?
- How long would a bumblebee take to travel around the world?
- Riddle: There are 3 switches outside for lights in the attic. You may flip the switches and make one trip to the attic. Match each light with its switch.
- What's the probability of getting 5 heads and 5 tails if you flip a coin 10 times?
- David's parents have three sons: Snap, Crackle and what's the name of the third son?
- Good books for AIME preparation
- Why are zeroes of functions interesting to study?
- If a straight line passes through the curve \(y= x^2,\) why are the two interceptions multiplied together equal to the y-intercept?