English
Quiz: Answers
31 March 2010
To score the three submissions for my trivia quiz, I followed the following scheme:[…]
Quiz
24 March 2010
Here’s a little quiz for my readers to test their knowledge: When was the Declaration of Independence signed? (Give the year, month and day.) What is the colour of pure water? Which weighs more—a pound of feathers or a pound of gold? What does Ich bin ein Berliner really mean? How many scholars in Columbus’ [...]
0·999…
20 February 2010
When many maths students encounter the expression 0·999… = 1·000…, they are a bit uneasy. It challenges their preconceived notion that each number can be represented in one and only one decimal way. One stumbling-block might be that they think of 0·999… as a large but finite string of digits—even if they accept an infinite string of nines, they may still think in terms of there being a last digit ‘at infinity’. Also, some students imagine 0·999… as more of a ‘process’ than a representation of a number. […]