Albert Girard (1595-1632) was a French-born mathematician who studied at the University of Leiden. He was the first to use the abbreviations 'sin', 'cos' and 'tan' for the trigonometric functions. Girard also showed how the area of a spherical triangle depends on its interior angles. If the angles of a triangle on the unit sphere … Continue reading Fermat’s Christmas Theorem
Month: December 2014
Information Theory
That’s Maths in The Irish Times this week (TM059, or Search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com) is about data compression and its uses in modern technology. The arrival of mobile phones was followed rapidly by "txtese", an abbreviation of language to enable messages to be written and transmitted rapidly using SMS (Short Message Service). The simplest … Continue reading Information Theory
New Curves for Old: Inversion
Special Curves A large number of curves, called special curves, have been studied by mathematicians. A curve is the path traced out by a point moving in space. To keep things simple, we assume that the point is confined to two-dimensional Euclidean space $latex {\mathbb{R}^2}&fg=000000$ so that it generates a plane curve as it moves. … Continue reading New Curves for Old: Inversion
The Year of George Boole
This week’s That’s Maths column in The Irish Times (TM058, or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com) is about George Boole, the first Professor of Mathematics at Queen's College Cork. Mathematician and logician George Boole died just 150 years ago, on 8 December 1864, following a drenching as he was walking between his home and Queen's … Continue reading The Year of George Boole
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