Pyrofessor Polya is not kidding. Consider this: What’s the side of a square inscribed inside a triangle?
Archive for the ‘high-school’ Category
How to solve it
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009On a cold night, you can hear forever
Sunday, December 6th, 2009Sound travels faster in warmer air than in cooler air.
Sound travels faster in denser media.
Speed of sound in a gas is almost independent of the density of the gas.
On a cold night, you can hear sound from farther on because of refraction.
Refraction is also why sometimes thunder for faraway lightning goes missing in action.
References:
http://paws.kettering.edu/~drussell/Demos/refract/refract.html
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/basics/sound-refraction.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_sound
The Tautochrone Problem
Sunday, December 6th, 2009Nature honors us with the mere existence of solutions to problems like the Tautochrone problem (and the fact that it is identical to the solution to the Brachistochrone problem). So dude’s got to give a patient reading to the calculus of variations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautochrone_curve
http://www.gap-system.org/~history/PrintHT/Brachistochrone.html
Somebody else got a handle on it already, and look how much money he’s saved:
http://www.aticourses.com/enhancing_saturn_v_moon_rocket.htm