UCT MAM1000 lecture notes 1 (part i) – preamble.

I will attempt to post notes for the coming sixty lectures on a daily basis. You can either ask questions about the topics which you don’t understand here, or email me directly, or of course come and chat in my office when I’m around.

These notes are for the second semester of MAM1000. They are neither complete nor exact and no responsibility is held for the accuracy within. Mistakes are undoubtedly included. That being said, I hope that they can be a useful resource in addition to the course textbook (Stewart) and additional online materials.
I am always very grateful when people find mistakes in these notes. These may be in the form of spelling, grammar, calculational errors, typos in formulae, typesetting errors and anything else which doesn’t seem to make sense. If an explanation is not clear, please contact me and I will do my best to explain it in another way.

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By Jonathan Shock| July 20th, 2015|Courses, English, First year, Level: intermediate, MAM1000, Uncategorized, Undergraduate|7 Comments

Attracting women and girls to careers in physics – video seminar on the 6th of August

Attracting women and girls to careers in physics

This seminar may be attended via video conference in Pretoria, Cape Town and KwaZulu-Natal. Details are indicated below.

The HSRC Seminar Series In collaboration with the Africa Institute of South Africa

Speaker: Dr Malebo Tibane, Department of Physics, Unisa,

Discussant: Dr Palesa Sekhejane, HSRC

Chair: Prof. Narnia Bohler-Muller, HSRC

Venues in Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town (Videoconferencing facilities: see below)

Date: 6 August 2015

Time: 12h30 – 14H00

Representation of girls and women in the Physics related sector is declining or stagnating globally and locally. Therefore, issues that hamper on the development of women to participate equally in male-dominated spheres need to be discussed and captured adequately to create an enabling environment for women and girls in the sciences, and physics in general. In November 2005 Women in Physics in South Africa (WiPiSA) was launched, with funding from the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and under the auspices of the South African Institute of Physics.…

By Jonathan Shock| July 19th, 2015|Advertising, Conference advert, English, Event, News|0 Comments

Mathematica details of the cooking with maths post – part 2

Part 0.
Part 1.

So, by the end of the previous post on Mathematica and Graph Theory, we had managed to take our single string of text and turn it into a graph of ingredients where nodes linked by edges go well together. Now we actually want to do something useful with this data – ie. come up with some recipes!

We will refer in the following to foodgraph as the graph of all of the food pairings we started with.

We will define a recipe very loosely as a set of ingredients all of which go well together. This is clearly far from a real recipe, but it’s a pretty good starting point for one.

Within the graph, a set of ingredients which all go well together form what is known as a connected subgraph – each node is linked to every other node. It’s no good having a recipe where A goes well with B and B goes well with C, but A doesn’t go well with C.…

By Jonathan Shock| June 30th, 2015|Uncategorized|0 Comments

Mathematica details of the cooking with mathematics post – part 2

Part 1 in this series can be found here.

So, by the end of the previous post on Mathematica and Graph Theory, we had managed to take our single string of text and turn it into a graph of ingredients which go well together. Now we actually want to do something useful with this data – ie. come up with some tasty recipes!

We will refer in the following to foodgraph as the graph of all of the food pairings we started with

We will define a recipe very loosely as a set of ingredients all of which go well together. This is clearly far from a real recipe, but it’s a pretty good starting point for one.

Within the graph, a set of ingredients which all go well together form what is known as a connected subgraph – each node is linked to every other node. It’s no good having a recipe where A goes well with B and B goes well with C, but A doesn’t go well with C.…

By Jonathan Shock| June 30th, 2015|Uncategorized|0 Comments

Mathematics societies in Africa – very little information on wikipedia

If you go to the Wikipedia page for the list of mathematics societies, you will see that very few societies within Africa are shown. A very quick Google search shows that many countries do indeed have their own mathematics society, so it would be great to try and find out which ones are active. If you know of an active society for a country which is not in the list (currently only South Africa and Gabon are listed as far as I can see), then please write it in the comments, we can collate them, and upon contacting them and asking whether they want to be listed on the wikipedia page, we can put in their details. Please spread the word and let’s see if we can get a few more societies highlighted.

How clear is this post?

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By Jonathan Shock| June 12th, 2015|Background|4 Comments

Mathemafrica poster – please spread the word!

Our very talented web developer Adam has designed a poster to advertise Mathemafrica.org. If you are in a mathematics department anywhere within Africa, or a highschool where you think this might be of interest, please think about printing the poster out and putting it up. If you would like to translate the poster into another language, we would also very much appreciate your help!

Download the poster here.

How clear is this post?

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By Jonathan Shock| June 10th, 2015|Advertising, Background, English|0 Comments

Mathematica details of the cooking with mathematics post

Edit: If you want to see the full code, I include everything in this post in the Mathematica file here.

I promised previously that we would go into depth into the graph theory and food calculations, so today we will do just that. This will be Mathematica heavy, so really this is only aimed at those who have played around with the Mathematica programming language.

I’ve been using this language now for over a decade, and while it is not the fastest language on the market for doing numerics-heavy calculations, it is an incredibly versatile language, and for getting code written fast, it’s hard to beat!

I tend to code in what is called a functional programming style (ideal for Mathematica), which doesn’t use loops as you would normally find in a procedural language. Perhaps the most oft used coding syntax you will see below is of the form:

somefunction[#]&/@{el1,el2,el3,el4…}

which takes the elements of a list and passes them one by one into a function.…

By Jonathan Shock| June 6th, 2015|English, Level: intermediate, Mathematica, Uncategorized|1 Comment

National Conference on Multilingualism in Higher Education

Eventually we want to make this a multilingual blogging platform. Some of the translations of the framework are in, and we hope to have the structure implemented soon. In addition we would love to get people blogging in other languages, and to get some of the current content translated.

The multilingual nature of South Africa is a very important issue in terms of education and there will be a conference focusing on this in August at UNISA. Check it out here.

How clear is this post?

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By Jonathan Shock| June 4th, 2015|Background, Conference advert|0 Comments

The Varsity Maths Problem

The following post is written by John Webb from The Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at The University of Cape Town. With his permission I include it here as an advert for a book which is discussed at the bottom of the post. Mathemafrica receives no payment for including this text. I hope that in addition to being an advert for the book, this may be a chance for students to discuss some of the problems they see with the transition between school and University here in South Africa for maths students.

Why do so many first-year students fail varsity maths?
Thousands of students across South Africa have started their university careers, and many of them have enrolled for a course in Mathematics. Some will be aiming at a maths major, in particular those who hope to teach mathematics at school level. But far more will be doing maths as a requirement for their degrees in a whole range of areas.…

By Jonathan Shock| June 3rd, 2015|Background, English, Level: Simple|4 Comments

Cooking with Mathematics

This post is not going to be very maths-heavy but will include some concepts from the area of graph theory which we will use in an unusual setting.

Today we’re going to get into the virtual kitchen and get our virtual taste buds a-buzzing….Well, actually we’re going to get our computers to do the hard work of finding out some tasty recipes and we’re going to use a few different techniques to do this. The workhorse is going to be the Mathematica programming language, but a lot of what we will do will be doable in any programming language, though perhaps it will be slightly more cumbersome than this.

The starting point of our culinary adventure will be a piece of text, taken from a website of flavour pairings here.

We see here that we have a piece of text which we can copy and paste into our Mathematica file.…

By Jonathan Shock| May 31st, 2015|English, Level: intermediate|6 Comments

About Jonathan Shock

Attracting women and girls to careers in physics