Jonathan Shock – Page 11

About Jonathan Shock

I'm a lecturer at the University of Cape Town in the department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics. I teach mathematics both at undergraduate and at honours levels and my research interests lie in the intersection of applied mathematics and many other areas of science, from biology and neuroscience to fundamental particle physics and psychology.

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Does knowledge of past years affect the Keynesian Beauty Contest result?

Courses, First year, MAM1000, Undergraduate

Does knowledge of past years affect the Keynesian Beauty Contest result?

Last year I played the 2/3 numbers game, also called the Keynesian Beauty Contest with my first year maths class. The discussion can be found here: http://www.mathemafrica.org/?p=11143 I wanted to know if, telling my class the results from last year (including sketching for them the histogram of results), would change how they chose their numbers this year. Of course I can’t tell if it changed them, but what is fascinating is that either:

Their guesses (if I didn’t tell them about the results from last year) would have been very different from those last year, or:
They were completely unaffected by knowing what people did last year, which really means that they believed that the rest of the class would have been unaffected.

I plot here the results from the last three years and you can see how similar the results are, year on year.

You can see that the distributions are relatively similar, and the means are extremely close.…

By Jonathan Shock| August 6th, 2016|Courses, First year, MAM1000, Undergraduate|0 Comments

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Picturing volumes of revolution

Courses, First year, MAM1000, Undergraduate

Picturing volumes of revolution

One of the homework questions this week was the following:

Let $R=\{(x,y)\in \mathbb{R}^2:y\ge 0, \cos x\le y\le \sin x\,\,and\,\,0\le x\le\pi\}.$

a) Sketch the region R and find its area.
b) Find the volume of the solid obtained by rotating the region R around the y-axis.

The first thing to do is to sketch the graphs of $y=\cos x$ and $y=\sin x$ . Once you’ve done that, the other parts of the inequalities should be clear. It should look like the red region in the following plot:

Now we have to imagine bringing out a third axis, perpendicular to the picture above, ie. coming out towards us. We then want to rotate the red form here about the vertical axis. This we can imagine doing in the following animation:

Given this form we can then think about either taking horizontal cross-sections through it, which will give us thin annuli, or we can take vertical, circular slices to give us thin shells. Adding these together and integrating should give us the same answer whichever way we choose to slice it, but one way will be considerably easier.…

By Jonathan Shock| August 4th, 2016|Courses, First year, MAM1000, Undergraduate|1 Comment

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An integral expression for n!

Courses, English, First year, Level: intermediate, MAM1000, Uncategorized, Undergraduate

An integral expression for n!

I gave a challenge question at the end of class a week or so ago. Here I will give the solution and show that it gives us something rather strange and surprisingly useful.

I wrote down the following, and asked you to prove it:

$\int_0^\infty e^{-t} t^N dt=N!$

For $N\ge 0, N\in \mathbb{Z}$ . Now, N! can be thought of as the number of different orderings of pulling N objects out of a bag (without replacement) when they are all different. If you have N things in a bag, then there are N possible things that you can pull out first. There are then N-1 ways of pulling out the next object, N-2 ways of pulling out the next, etc. and finally, when you’ve pulled out N-1 objects there’s only a single possibility of pulling out the last. So:

$N!=N(N-1)(N-2)(N-3)...3.2.1$

And the number of ways of pulling no objects out of a bag is 1, because you just don’t pull anything out.…

By Jonathan Shock| July 30th, 2016|Courses, English, First year, Level: intermediate, MAM1000, Uncategorized, Undergraduate|0 Comments

A general formula for partial fractions

Out of the blue I wrote down a rather confusing mass of indices and summations on the board a few days ago. Writing this down at the last minute was perhaps a bad idea, but I wanted to show what the general form for expanding a fraction into partial fractions was. Here I’m just motivating it a little more. It’s not something that you will need to use, but it’s often good to write things down in as general a form as you can.

Let’s say that we have an expression of the form:

$\frac{P(x)}{(x+3)(x-2)^2}$

Where P(x) is some polynomial of degree less than 3 (because the denominator is degree 3). We can write this as:

$\frac{A}{x+3}+\frac{B}{(x-2)^2}+\frac{C}{x-2}$

To find A, B and C, you cross-multiply, and then match coefficients of powers of x with those in P(x). If you have an irreducible quadratic in the denominator you will have terms of the form:

$\frac{Ax+B}{ax^2+bx+c}$

in your partial fraction, and of course if it’s an irreducible quadratic to an integer power greater than one, you will have multiple terms, just as you do for the (x-2) expression in the example above.…

By Jonathan Shock| July 30th, 2016|Courses, First year, MAM1000, Uncategorized, Undergraduate|1 Comment

Where did that substitution come from?

If you want to understand maths, you really have to do it. I recommend going through these examples and using the substitutions given here as hints. Get a blank piece of paper, put your notes away and try to do these examples and see if you get the same answers as in class. If you don’t, write in the comments, and we can see where things may have gone astray.

I’ve been teaching integration by substitution, including by trig substitutions over the last few days, and a frequent question which a newbie substituter will ask is “how did you know to make that substitution?”. It’s a very reasonable question, and one that takes practice to build the correct intuition, but I’ll do my best to give some motivation now as to why we made some of the substitutions we made. We won’t solve the integrals, but we will motivate here why we make particular choices for substitutions.…

By Jonathan Shock| July 22nd, 2016|Courses, English, First year, MAM1000, Undergraduate|2 Comments

Down the rabbit hole

The following has been a rather interesting journey – from a test question which seemed fine, to a subtlety which seemed easy, to a discussion with a number of different mathematicians about the nature of distributions, measure theory and regularisation. I will try and make it as clear as possible in the post below. Note, as mentioned in the comments, we have actually only found the solution to this problem for a constrained range of x, and not x $\in \mathbb{R}$ . I didn’t want to complicate things any more than necessary here for first year students, but the comments are very important too.

In a recent class test, there was a question, written by me, which was not quite the question that I wanted to ask. It turns out that it does have an answer, but it’s not an answer that can yet be found by the means at the class’s disposal.…

By Jonathan Shock| May 27th, 2016|Courses, First year, MAM1000, Uncategorized, Undergraduate|7 Comments

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The Newton-Raphson Method

Courses, First year, MAM1000, Uncategorized, Undergraduate

The Newton-Raphson Method

How would you go about finding the value of $\sqrt{3}$ if you didn’t have a square root button on your calculator? Well, the most obvious thing might be to try some values, based on your knowledge of the square root function. You are being asked to find that x for which:

$x=\sqrt{3}$

or, in other words, that x, which, when squared gives 3. We have to be a little careful here because we know that there will actually be two numbers which satisfy this (one positive, one negative), and we are interested in the positive one only.

So, we try some values, but we don’t do it randomly, we can see that because $1^2=1$ and $2^2=4$ that whatever number squared gives 3 must be between 1 and 2. We can try something called a binary intersection. This just means taking the values which we know bound the right answer (ie. we know that 1<x<2), and trying the number in the middle.…

By Jonathan Shock| May 15th, 2016|Courses, First year, MAM1000, Uncategorized, Undergraduate|4 Comments

IMU Breakout Graduate Fellowships – Call for Nominations by professional mathematicians nominating highly motivated and mathematically talented students from developing countries

A very interesting opportunity for talented potential graduate students. This is taken directly from the Commission for Developing Countries website.

Please think about finding a potential supervisor if you think that you qualify, such that they can nominate you.

Thanks to a generous donation by the winners of the Breakthrough Prizes in Mathematics – Ian Agol, Simon Donaldson, Maxim Kontsevich, Jacob Lurie, Terence Tao and Richard Taylor– the International Mathematical Union, with the assistance of FIMU and TWAS is launching a fellowship program to support postgraduate studies, in a developing country, leading to a PhD degree in the mathematical sciences. The IMU Breakout Graduate Fellowships offer a limited number of grants for excellent students from developing countries.

Professional mathematicians are invited to nominate highly motivated and mathematically talented students from developing countries who plan to complete a doctoral degree in a developing country, including their own home country.…

By Jonathan Shock| April 29th, 2016|Advertising|0 Comments

Proof by induction winner: Gianluca Truda

With many congratulations for the winning entry, as voted for by mostly MAM1000W students!

At the end of every year, many families celebrate the holiday season by decorating a Christmas tree, and almost all of them will use some form of lights. The kind of cheap lights that sit on a long wire that gets wrapped around a tree, and then sparkle in a whole lot of awesome colours when you plug them into the power socket.

In my family, we have a whole lot of these kinds of cheap, fragile lights in a big box. Every year, when we decorate the tree, the box gets opened and is full of hopelessly tangled wires which were hastily shoved in the year before. It’s always a bit of a pain untangling the wires and it can get really
boring testing each string of lights to see if they are still working.…

By Jonathan Shock| April 23rd, 2016|Courses, First year, MAM1000, Undergraduate|3 Comments

Logical implications and the structure of if and only if statements

We had a homework assignment a couple of weeks back. It was looking at mathematics in a very different way from how many had seen it before, and it caused a lot of confusion. I would like to try and add some clarity to what we were doing. My thought was, rather than going through the questions themselves, I would like to add annotations to the proof itself. Let’s see how this works. The proof that you were given is in black, the annotations are in blue, and after I’ve been through the proof, I will expand on it in a simplified form.

Theorem: The function f is differentiable at x=a if and only if there is a constant m and a function E of x, defined for all $x \not = a$ , such that

$f(x)=f(a)+m(x-a)+E(x)(x-a)$ for all $x \not = a$ – (eq 1)

and,

$\lim\limits_{x\to a}E(x)=0$ .

(If both these conditions are satisfied, then $f'(a)=m$ .)

What we are doing here is giving another definition of differentiability (at a particular point, a).…

By Jonathan Shock| April 22nd, 2016|Courses, First year, MAM1000, Uncategorized, Undergraduate|1 Comment

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