Dr Kevin Houston
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DrKevinHouston
commented
4 months ago
Why 1/0 is not infinity
Why can't we divide by zero? The answer is here! I also talk about why 1/0 is not infinity.
@GuythePikey By drawing the line of the graph tending to +/- infinity.
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DrKevinHouston
commented
6 months ago
Why 1/0 is not infinity
Why can't we divide by zero? The answer is here! I also talk about why 1/0 is not infinity.
@Scp1966 Thanks for the comment. I don't really say that 1/0 is not infinity because of a simple math rule. I say that you can't divide by zero and that if you define 1/0 to be anything - even infinity - then we get problems.
I want to overcome students saying that 1/0 is obviously infinity. Tha...
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DrKevinHouston
commented
6 months ago
Why 1/0 is not infinity
Why can't we divide by zero? The answer is here! I also talk about why 1/0 is not infinity.
@CaballusKnight I had a genuine interest in trying to understand what you meant. If you do not wish to be understood, then that is your choice and I am 100% comfortable with that.
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DrKevinHouston
commented
6 months ago
Why 1/0 is not infinity
Why can't we divide by zero? The answer is here! I also talk about why 1/0 is not infinity.
@kurtwshrout Thanks for the comment. I don't think it's flawed. When we do algebra we want to know what a times b divided by a means. This gets tricky when a=0. By saying that we need special notation for dealing with 1/0 I feel that you are agreeing with me.
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DrKevinHouston
commented
6 months ago
Why 1/0 is not infinity
Why can't we divide by zero? The answer is here! I also talk about why 1/0 is not infinity.
@CaballusKnight Sorry, I still don't understand what the m signifies. Please define or give a page reference in a standard text.
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DrKevinHouston
commented
5 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@SpinachInquisition You've probably moved on - I should have replied sooner. Can you tell me where in the video there are awkward pauses? I really want to know the answer, I'm not being defensive. Thanks!
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DrKevinHouston
commented
5 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@matleyz It's not often that Thomas Paine is quoted on YouTube so thanks for the comment!
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DrKevinHouston
commented
5 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@JIJICA100 It makes almost no sense to use imperial. Your example shows that tradition is very hard to overturn.
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DrKevinHouston
commented
5 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@JIJICA100 How much sense does this make? Not much. There seems to be a fragmentary sentence beginning with "When". Can you be a bit clearer? Thanks!
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DrKevinHouston
commented
5 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@DUDELOVE5551SBRO Are you calling me intelligent and knowledgeable? How dare you!
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DrKevinHouston
commented
5 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@TheoryXI Using eta does make some formulae look nicer but does it really bring deeper understanding? I can't see how the fundamental number to associate to a circle is the one defined using a quarter of a circle. He's joking anyway...
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DrKevinHouston
commented
6 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@nestorlovesguitar Well, the study chapters are quite short already - I could have written a whole book on how to study. The point is that many students don't realize that they should write maths so that someone else can understand it and some don't know that they should read maths with a pen and...
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DrKevinHouston
commented
6 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@nestorlovesguitar Thank you very much. It's good to hear that physicists also enjoy it.
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DrKevinHouston
commented
6 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@vaprsnake21 Sorry, didn't realize the language was strong. My intention was to go with kinda jokey (hence the sound effects, newspaper headline, etc).
Also, look at the comments below, people do use e^{i pi}=-1 and are very passionate about losing it, it wasn't just a contrivance.
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DrKevinHouston
commented
6 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@mtcic And hence the radius gets counted twice...
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DrKevinHouston
commented
6 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@drmarvin613 That is just great! We should have gone with Ti. Using tau we lost lots of puns. With Ti we have a new set. Mathematicians ti-ed up in knots, Ti-red of pi? etc, etc.
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DrKevinHouston
commented
6 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@r5asnita No problem, just use pi if you need pi. The point is that a lot of the time you need tau.
Also, let's consider your example of area of circle tau/2 *r^2. Well, the formula for the area of a slice of circle is theta/2 r^2 where theta is the angle of the slice. So if you had been brought...
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DrKevinHouston
commented
7 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@jiberish001 I think you're right about diameter and width! I honestly didn't think it would be a problem when I was writing the script so didn't pay enough attention to it.
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DrKevinHouston
commented
7 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@bjo885 Hello! Thanks for your comment. I think that tau is better in this case because of the geometric interpretation of e^{ix} (where x is real). See Vi Hart's video for a good explanation. Her rather excellent video is probably listed on the right under suggestions.
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DrKevinHouston
commented
7 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@fishcomputer33 Sorry to hear you've got that problem. Works just fine for me - get yourself a voice coach, it'll be ok. ;)
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DrKevinHouston
commented
6 months ago
Pi may be wrong, but so is Tau!
A response to the recent talk about scrapping Pi as the fundamental circle constant and replacing it with Tau. I think BOTH are wrong and we should...
This is just obviously nonsense. How can you possibly say that Euler's formula is better with eta? And have you thought of the expense of changing all the textbooks? U r crzay dude! Thumbs down evrywun.
Kevin Houston
PS I'm joking.
PPS Can't wait for Michael John Blake's take on this.
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DrKevinHouston
commented
7 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@enderbantoo Hmmm. I should perhaps have made that bit of the video clearer. Maybe I should have taken random points. I was originally going to do an animation to show the constant width but didn't have time. (Too many exams to mark, etc.)
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DrKevinHouston
commented
7 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@pgm3 Thanks for that. Made me chuckle!
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DrKevinHouston
commented
7 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@jiberish001 The coin is a valid example. Search online for "curves of constant width" or read Alex Bellos' book Alex's Adventures in Numberland (called Here's Looking at Euclid in USA).
The outer edge is rounded so that width (diameter) is constant and yes a true heptagon would not have constan...
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DrKevinHouston
commented
7 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@GHudston Tau-tellini?
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DrKevinHouston
commented
7 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@Gytax0 How does the diameter change? A 50p coin has constant diameter. I've not altered the picture.
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DrKevinHouston
commented
7 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@DeignK Mum, is that you?
Actually, how does posting such a video get me known for the quality of my research?
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DrKevinHouston
commented
7 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@mtcic You can rely on xkcd. I'm going to do my top five favourites on my blog one day.
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DrKevinHouston
commented
7 months ago
@seiferganon Similar problem to the previous argument, I think. You are now looking only at the _vertices_ in the folded figure and not _all points_ in the figure. Suppose we had a circle inside a circle and the outer one converges to the inner. At the beginning we have two special points on the ...
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DrKevinHouston
commented
7 months ago
@delameu Thanks for the comment. What does it mean to have infinitely small steps?
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DrKevinHouston
commented
7 months ago
@vibrattler Can you prove rigorously that the limit curve is a fractal?
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DrKevinHouston
commented
7 months ago
Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@MountThor Looks like fun. Maybe I'll get round to looking into it. But I have an exam paper to write, exam boards to attend...
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Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@ovidiu541 Don't get me started on "The angles in a triangle add up to 180 degrees".
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Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@FenBolds Put it in your diary for next year!
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Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@pillager61 Hello! Thanks for dropping by. I second the comment about maths and science being in flux.
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Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@MrPsichy Not too hard but harder than writing nothing - which is what we do with tau.
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Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@helveticalouie There's a tau Facebook page? Whatever next! I hadn't noticed a tau Facebook page. I'll have to search for it next time I use Facebook.
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Pi is wrong! Here comes Tau Day
Tired of all those 2 times pi in your mathematical formula? Then switch to tau!
Tau Day is on Tuesday June 28th!
@mtcic Nice try! Maths statements are correct but interpretation is wrong. Tell me this: Where are the _two_ foci in the circle?
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Why 1/0 is not infinity
Why can't we divide by zero? The answer is here! I also talk about why 1/0 is not infinity.
@CaballusKnight Sorry I genuinely can't work out what "0m" and "1/0m=inf" mean. Since you claim the latter is any book of math can you give me a standard text and page number. Thanks!
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Common Mistakes: Square Roots
A look at the precise definition of the square root function and problems arising from misuse of square roots.
778 views
DrKevinHouston said:
@mascoteponto I would say that there is no unique square root and so we can't talk about THE square root of a number. The point is that when we move to complex numbers then we have to introduce multi-valued functions or make branch cuts in the complex plane to define roots and logs. By first bein...
Common Mistakes: Square Roots
A look at the precise definition of the square root function and problems arising from misuse of square roots.
778 views
DrKevinHouston said:
@mascoteponto Thanks for the comment. I'm not sure what you mean by shattered when we get to complex numbers. One of my reasons for doing the real case carefully is that students often don't fully understand the subtleties of the complex case. The video helps lay the groundwork for dealing with t...
Perfect Shuffle
This is a demo version so comments are welcome.
6,048 views
DrKevinHouston said:
@Jamindekker Some people can spot that it's half the deck. I can do that sometimes. However, the point is that the deck is in order to begin with and when you do a perfect shuffle all the cards end up in a pre-determined place. So the first time you do 8 shuffles in a row you carefully find the h...
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