Sunday, January 25, 2015

Math handwriting recognition software- Impressive


Khan academy has made a new handwriting recognition software that can read and understand handwriting using programming. The software was released as a mobile app. The new version adds more personalized lesson plans, including 150,000 lessons that are aligned to the national Common Core educational standards. It can automatically identify long equations (and is even able to manipulate and erase them easily), which was designed in partnership with handwriting recognition company, MyScript. It is also possible to put math equations into a computer. Academic papers are submitted in electronic form, though mostly for publishing.


As of now, the equations are mostly for early high school. But it’s easy to see how they extend to all sorts of advanced math in the near future.


Sources:
http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/20/khan-academys-new-math-handwriting-recognition-software-is-impressive-video/

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Plato

Plato was a Greek mathematician and philosopher born in Athens somewhere in between 429 and 423 BC. He was also one of ancient Greece’s most important patrons of mathematics.  Inspired by Pythagoras, he founded his Academy in Athens in 387 BC, where he stressed mathematics as a way of understanding more about reality. In his academy, some of the questions he asked his students were
the Three Classical Problems(“squaring the circle”, “doubling the cube” and “trisecting the angle”) and to some extent these problems have become identified with Plato, although he was not the first to pose them. 








He was best known for his identification of 5 regular symmetrical 3-dimensional shapes. The 5 3-dimensional shapes were called the Platonic Solids which contained the tetrahedron (constructed of 4 regular triangles), the octahedron (composed of 8 triangles), the icosahedron (composed of 20 triangles), the cube (composed of 6 squares), and the dodecahedron (made up of 12 pentagons) .

Plato was a very successful mathematician and philosopher. He was also a pioneer of education in mathematics.

Sources:
www.storyofmathematics.com/greek_plato.html

www.famous-mathematicians.com/plato/

planetmath.org/platosmathematics