BLOGGINGLANGUE

“Hidden Figures” (Theodore Melfi, 2016) is a film based on a true story. The film is the untold story of female African-American mathematicians who served a vital role in NASA during the early years of the U.S. space program. This film is based on a book of the same name and follows three black women who worked in NASA in 1961. The three main characters are Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), a brilliant mathematician, Dorothy Vaughan (Academy Winner Octavia Spencer), the leader of the “colored human computers”, and finally, Mary Jackson (the singer Janelle Monáe) who tries to be the NASA’s first female engineer. All three women make progress in their attempts to reach their goals but with much difficulty, based on their gender and their race.  The cast of the film also includes the 90s star Kevin Costner, Academy winner Mahershala Ali, Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane in Sam Raimi’s trilogy “Spider-Man”) and Jim Parsons (Sheldon in “The Big Bang Theory”). The st...

Aidé and Noelia have written an article about Pythagoras. Selena and Irene have written about Plato and his works in Mathematics

Story of the x In writings by Arab mathematicians prior to the 15 th century there are references to equations. They called the unknown element the thing, because they had  no other name for it. “How much is the thing if when increased by five it is double the thing minus seven?” The word thing in Arabic, is pronounced xay, so this is the expression  translators used. Later it was abbreviated to its initial letter, x. Equations: degree and difficulty Finding formulas to solve first and second-degree equiatons is not very difficult for mathematicians. Those problems were solved in the Middle Ages. But this wasn´t the case with problems that had a higher degree than two. In fact, during the Renaissance, Italian mathematicians of the 16 th century, who were then considered the most advanced mathematicians, worked hard in this area. At the end of the 17 th century they continued to find ways to solve equiations with a superior degree of up to four until, i...

In Mathematics, natural numbers are the numbers that we use for counting objects (one, two, three…) and ordinal numbers for ordering objects (first, second, third…). Cardinal numbers and ordinal numbers are both natural numbers. In ancient Greece, the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras (570 BC-495 BC) and his followers attributed divine, mystical powers to numbers. They believed that numbers governed everything, from the movements of the planets to music. They also believed that some numbers were more divine or mystical than others and gave special meanings to different numbers. They believed, for example, that a number could represent justice or wisdom. The holiest number of all was "tetractys" or ten, a triangular number composed of the sum of one, two, three and four. It is a great tribute to the Pythagoreans' intellectual achievements that they deduced the special place of the number 10 from an abstract mathematical argument rather than from something as ...

Educational games about prime numbers and about multiplication tables.  Maths curiosities.  An educational game about prime numbers  The destructor of prime numbers  In order to start the game, click  here and then press the button "Empezar" www.ematematicas.net/destructor.php An educational game about multiplication table The hunter of alliens  Click here to start the game of the hunter of alliens    Tricks to learn multiplication tables easily   The   multiplication table of nine  One interesting fact about the multiplication table of nine is that the sum of the digits of every product is nine too.  TRICKS TO LEARN THE MULTIPLICATION TABLE OF SEVEN Draw a small square thre by three as  it shows below. Now we start from the top right corner.Write in the first square, and then 2 and 3 downwards. Jump to the next column and write 4, and then 5 and 6 downwards. Finall...

PRIME NUMBERS    Interesting facts about “Prime Numbers “ We all know   the prime numbers are infinite. The Greek mathematician Euclides proved it 23 centuries ago. Except for both prime numbers 2 and 5, while the rest of prime numbers end in 1, 3, 7 and 9. What is the largest known prime number? It was discovered that the prime numbers have the form :    2 p -1   where   p is a prime number.     Although not all the numbers with this form are considered to be prime numbers. To date, the biggest prime numbers known is 2 57885161 -1 which is called     Mersenne Prime .   There are 174 digits in this number which was discovered in the U.S.A. at the University of Missouri by Dr. C. Cooper in 2013, within the collaborative GIMPS project, that has been searching for the greatest prime number since   1996, the whole proyect has been supported by a software installed on the...