By: Michael Mo Once in a while, Twitter blows up with the story of a high school dropout who became a multi-billionaire. Before long, people would start saying things like “university is useless!” or “School is useless!” in the comment section. Their “argument” is that Ivy League graduates are struggling to find jobs while high […]
The puzzling world of ciphers
By Megan Wang As someone who loves brainteasers, logic puzzles have always appealed to me. At our most recent FSL session, we had the pleasure to learn about ciphers and try to crack some of our own! We looked at Caesar ciphers (more on that later), but there is still a wide variety of ciphers […]
The Apple of my Pi
If I could name my favourite number, it would be pi or π. It is irrational. I mean, not irrational like my sister, but because it is a decimal that goes on forever and cannot be expressed as a fraction. It is also transcendental. That is not some yogi term. A transcendental number is a […]
The Birthday Paradox: A Blind Spot of Intuitive Probability
By Nina Peloso As people, our first impression of the ‘chances’ is almost always reliant on ‘intuitive probability‘. Most often, this habit helps us by letting us make broad assumptions that (usually) turn out to be correct. However, sometimes our intuition is what bars us from wrapping our heads around the actual solution. In 1885, […]
Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox
By: Michael Mo Once upon a time, an Ancient Greek philosopher named Zeno created a paradox that “denied” the possibility for movement. Here is how it goes: If a person wants to travel from Point A to Point B, they must first walk half that distance in a finite amount of time. Thereafter, they must […]
Intermediate Value Theorem
By: Michael Mo The Intermediate Value Theorem – IVT – is a concept in calculus that talks about the property of a continuous function. Not that continuity on its own has a rigorous definition based on the concept of limits. For the sake of simplicity, however, we can just assume that a continuous function is […]
Finding Love: Destiny or Formula?
Written by: Aaliyah Khan When you think of math, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Numbers? Variables? A giant, unnecessarily heavy textbook? For many the only implementation of math they recognize is what happens inside a classroom. In reality, as cliche as it may seem, math truly is all around us. We […]
What Actually Is Calculus?
Normally, calculus is an advanced highschool or even university subject. However, with only an understanding of basic linear equations, you can grasp the idea behind calculus without any confusing mathematical concepts. Prep Work Once, I owned a lemonade stand, and I wanted to keep track of how much I sell each day. Miraculously, each day I had the same amount of lemonade sold; from this information, I […]
The Travelling Salesman Problem: Do you want a million dollars?
By Diana U Imagine that you are a travelling salesman. Let’s say that you have to visit three different cities to find buyers for your product. You want to find the fastest route to visit all three cities and then return to your home town without visiting the same city twice. Find the most efficient […]
Using Mathematics to Model Pandemics
I’ve wondered ever since the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020 if there were any methods to predict when the pandemic might end. This question led me to discover the SIR model, a mathematical model used by scientists to predict the course of an infectious disease. But what is the SIR model? And what does it […]