Jonathan Payne

We’re going on an adventure…

Crossing the Road in Britain, 1931-1976 ‘If you need a real bodice-ripper, try Joe Moran’s “Crossing the Road in Britain, 1931-1976”. The paper illustrates how much of our attitude towards pedestrian and traffic controls, that zool…

An interesting article on the history of road crossings (including this point) here: joemoran.net/academic-art... I thought it was interesting that ‘jay walking’ was used occasionally in the uk going back a fair bit

Philip Glass - Sesame Street - Geometry of Circles.mp4 YouTube video by SamCam2011

Kids love Philip Glass

youtu.be/4JWwOzEDGss?...

One thing that makes this difficult is the huge range it how AI might be used to code. Very reasonable to label a project that’s entirely vibe-coded as made with AI. Less so if someone’s just using copilot to autocomplete short snippets/lines of code they would’ve typed themselves anyway

Teach, check, practice. (Which is pretty much the same structure as I-we-you)

Making things easier to retrieve and better organised in long term memory

Two geometric figures. The first is a rectangle ABCD. X is a point on AB and Y is a point on AD such that AX = AY = x cm, AB = y cm, YD = z cm. The triangle XCY is coloured grey. The vertices are not labelled in the diagram but used here for precision. The second figure is a right-angled trapezium. The parallel sides have length z cm and y cm. The perpendicular height is x cm. It is also grey.

The two grey areas can be shown to be equal using some algebra. It seems like there should be a nice geometric argument (e.g. with cutting and rearranging), but I can't find one. Am I missing something obvious?

Very pleased with my mathematical broccoli/cauliflower. Just the one out of 8ish plants seemed to work

A screen shot from a LLM chat, reading 'Got it—I’ll avoid using em-dashes in all future responses' (using and em-dash)

Why do I not believe you?

The “Just Tell Them” Trap How direct instruction gets mistranslated as 'teacher talk,' lecturing and all sorts of other dull bobbins

Telling students stuff is sensible. But if you’re *just* telling them, you’re not really teaching.
open.substack.com/pub/daviddid...

During our #MathsConf39 session, Jason and I revealed our new project: The History and Maths in Education Network (historyand.mathsy.space) which aims to facilitate discussion and sharing of resources & ideas amongst folks interested in using history themes to enrich maths education.

🏛️🎓 #MathsToday

I think if you’re not too picky about what counts as showing something, then there’s very little that can’t be given some kind of an explanation. I think some volume formulae might be the only things

Depends on how picky you want to be with what counts as showing something is true. You can pretty much always go deeper on the why, in which case it might never be the case (e.g measure theory before area/volume, peano axioms before adding etc)

Letter from Ed Davey to Keir Starmer condemning Elon Musk for inciting violence and urging unity to defend democracy.

I've written to Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, urging them to join me in condemning Elon Musk's dangerous remarks inciting violence yesterday.

As leaders, we must stand together and make clear Musk will face serious consequences for these actions.

Elon Musk openly called for violence on our streets yesterday.

I hope politicians from all parties come together to condemn his deeply dangerous and irresponsible rhetoric.

Britain must stand united against this clear attempt to undermine our democracy.

It’s official - “Nigel Farage is right, don’t vote for him” is a demonstrably awful strategy for Labour. Boosts salience of immigration, costs votes on the left, doesn’t persuade any voters on right (why would they accept a crap knock-off when they can have the original?)

I know the usual thing is to point out interesting properties of the *current* year, but interesting to note that 2027 (+2029) will be the first twin prime year for 30 years

This is my flag.

This is a terrifying sentence

And overall difficulty is of course definitely above what would ever be expected at GCSE

I think calling it 'just-about GCSE level' was a bit too much of a stretch! Thought was that something like 'prove that the square of an odd number is one more than a multiple of 4' doesn't require any mod arithmetic heavy-lifting.

The most surprising thing doing this was what the product of the gradients of the tangents is in terms of a, b and c

Was playing with generalising a question from the new Edexcel EMC when I cam across this interesting fact. Nice to be able to come up with a question which combines algebraic proof and coordinate geometry. All just-about GCSE level

It's from the textbook for Edexcel's new L2 Extended Maths Certificate

Pretty significant misconception to be stating as fact in an official textbook from an exam board

Thanks

I’d be curious about reading this. Do you have a reference? Thanks

Text reads: A baby was born in July. What month will it be on their birthday 15 months later?

'Interesting' understanding of how birthdays work from ChatGPT here...

An isosceles trapezium ABCE with parallel sides AB=12cm and DC=6cm, and angle DAB=60°. A square ADEF is joined on the the side. Angle FBA is marked as x

ABCD is an isosceles trapezium and ADEF is a square.

Find the size of angle ABF.

A quadrilateral ABCA, with vertices A(0,4), B (0,2), C (2,0) and D (5,0)

Does quadrilateral ABCD have a pair of perpendicular opposite sides?