Republic of Mathematics blog

Posts Tagged ‘math

Save 30%, be 30% better off?

Posted by: Gary Ernest Davis on: February 22, 2011

A travel advertisement running, currently in the US, says you can save 30% on travel costs, and so be 30% better off. Is that right? How about 50% off? To make it easier to think about, let’s think how much we would save if we got 50% off the price of something. Suppose some item […]

Some fun with a (very) simple matrix

Posted by: Gary Ernest Davis on: February 20, 2011

Geometry of a transformation The matrix is very simple: it has entries consisting only of 0’s and 1’s. As a matrix we can think of as transforming points in the euclidean plane. These are points with coordinates where are real numbers. The matrix transforms the point into the point : We can look at what […]