Taking your IB Diploma? Here’s a revision plan…

March 1, 2019

I don’t want to be too prescriptive about how you should revise – everyone’s different, everyone remembers stuff in different ways – but you should definitely prepare a revision plan. If you don’t, then it will be a matter of luck whether or not...

A Mathematical Card Trick

February 15, 2019

Card tricks fall into several categories, and my favourite are those which look amazing but actually have some pretty simple maths behind them. Here’s one of the simplest! 1.     Take an ordinary pack of cards and shuffle it. Deal out 26 cards, face up, and...

Ancient Babylonians Do It Again!

January 9, 2019

Babylon – in ancient Mesopotamia, now Iraq – hosted one of the earliest recorded civilisations. Partly because they became a trading nation, they developed some of the earliest mathematical techniques. We already know that they were aware of what we now call...

Sampling Methods

December 14, 2018

In statistics, a population is the complete set of data which is to be analysed. A population may consist of people (e.g. those living in a particular city), or living things (e.g. the population of all humpback whales), but could be any set of objects with something...

Games with Dots

September 21, 2018

Do people still play pencil and paper games these days? I grew up with them in my family – all sorts from number games, word games, drawing games. A number of the mathematical games involve spots or dots and, believe me, they can be fiendishly difficult to win against...

What Do You Get Asked in University Interviews?

August 15, 2018

Some universities interview applicants. In the UK, the Oxford and Cambridge interviews are an important part of the application process, Imperial College and UCL tend to interview the majority of applicants. In the US, many Ivy League colleges also carry out...