History of Curves and Their Names

Here is some interesting history behind a few “good-looking” curves and how they got their names! Cissoid Equation: The Cissoid is named so because of its resemblance to the shape of a Cissus plant. The Cissoid is a curve, defined as the set of points P that is the same distance from a fixed point…

Teaching Programming: Some Tips and Tricks

Here is a collection of my thoughts and experiments on better teaching programming. This article is written in the context of the Mathematics Lab with Python taught in colleges in Bangalore/Karnataka. I have tried almost all of it: and I have seen them building confidence among students to write codes themselves. The most adopted strategy…

Puzzle: Do the Dance!

Step 1: Finding Nemo Can you find the function that is given in the graph below? Posted Earlier! Step 2: Drawing Pictures with Functions Functions are fun. Let’s take step 1 to a new level. Imagine the smiley face. Can we, rewrite it into a couple of equations? For example, was plotted with equations, given…

Being a Maths Evangelist

What better way to start the day? The first step to popularising maths is to defeat the fear that was instilled in you since early school days by parents, teachers, and friends. Given how my class with a mix of Life Science, Computer Science, and Arts majors students who used to tremble at the beginning,…

Storytelling to Introduce Applications of Laplace Transforms

“…and they couldn’t send the satellite up! Those big solar panels! Won’t fit in the rocket! If, in any way, they can pack it in the rocket – like we lazy souls pack our dresses when we go for a trip – and pull it out in the Outerspace and iron it back to the…

Quick Revision: Topology

An intuitive introduction to topology/quickly revise the paper after a semester of coursework.

The Pythagorean Triplet Problem

When there are too many numbers to crunch – we make computers do it! A problem you can solve with Brute Force Technique.