All Questions
6 questions
23
votes
14
answers
4k
views
Math talk for all ages
I've been asked to give a talk to the winners of a recent math competition. The talk can be entirely congratulatory, or it can contain a bit of actual mathematics. I'd prefer the latter. I'd also ...
93
votes
20
answers
10k
views
Short papers for undergraduate course on reading scholarly math
(I know this is perhaps only tangentially related to mathematics research, but I'm hoping it is worthy of consideration as a community wiki question.)
Today, I was reminded of the existence of this ...
79
votes
15
answers
9k
views
Sophisticated treatments of topics in school mathematics
Sophisticated mathematical concepts typically shed light on sophisticated mathematics. But in a few cases they also apply to elementary mathematics in an interesting way. I find such examples ...
81
votes
22
answers
15k
views
Are there proofs that you feel you did not "understand" for a long time?
Perhaps the "proofs" of ABC conjecture or newly released weak version of twin prime conjecture or alike readily come to your mind. These are not the proofs I am looking for. Indeed my question was ...
30
votes
15
answers
17k
views
Useless math that became useful
I'm writing an article on Lychrel numbers and some people pointed out that this is completely useless.
My idea is to amend my article with some theories that seemed useless when they are created but ...
16
votes
7
answers
2k
views
Unexpected applications of the fact that nth degree polynomials are determined by n+1 points
I had a funny idea for proving an identity in Euclidean geometry. While it didn't end up being a very nice proof strategy in my case, I would still like to collect nice examples of where the proof ...