135x Filetype PPTX File size 1.10 MB Source: www.standrewsbray.ie
Introduction This is a project that is going to answer the question: Is maths useful in everyday life? Even if you don’t take the time to take it in, maths is all around us. I hope this project will be interesting for you. You might already know a few things in this project but I hope you learn some new things as well. I learnt a lot while making this project. Counting When people started counting it’s likely they used their hands. They used their fingers to count as it is quite easy to count using fingers. This meant people started to count on a base of ten, which is the modern decimal system we use today. So why did people bother to count? Well if you asked a friend to hold 5 sweets for you and you didn’t know how to count they could steal some without you noticing! Does everyone know how to count? Yes, most people who need to do, but some, like the Pirahã tribe, only count to 2! Zero Zero doesn’t always mean nothing. For example if you put a zero on the end of a number it multiplies it by ten. If you ask someone “what is 40 x 8 x 2 x 4 x 5 x 1+47 x 0?” they probably think it is a really complicated question but it is actually 0. In fact anything multiplied by 0 is always 0. Sometimes if you ask a calculator what is anything divided by 0 it sometimes might say error or a very large number. So what went wrong? The answer is you can’t divide by 0 - it’s like asking “how many times does nothing go into 10?” Pi Pi is an irrational number (irrational meaning it goes on forever). If you drew a circle, measured its circumference, then measured the diameter and divided the circumference by the diameter you would get three and a bit which is also known as pi. Pi is impossible to work out exactly. It is also infinite. Its decimals ae totally random with no pattern whatsoever. Why is pi useful? Pi is very useful to scientists, engineers and designers. Anything circular and anything that moves in circles, involves pi. Without pi people would not be able to build things, understand how planets move or work out how many beans fit in a can. Every phone number in the world comes up in pi. The Fibonacci Sequence The Fibonacci sequence is in everything in nature. It was made by Leonardo Fibonacci, who was born in Pisa, Italy, 800 years ago. The Fibonacci sequence is made by adding up the previous 2 numbers eg. 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144,233 etc. The Fibonacci sequence is closely related to the number 1.618034 which is known as phi (say ‘fie’). Artists and mathematicians have known about this number for many years and for a long time people thought it had magical properties.
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