THE PASCAL'S TRIANGLE

Remembering Katherine G. Johnson : Mother, Mathematician, and a Pioneer for Space Exploration

Many people spend decades writing about an important figure, who has impacted not the life of a single person but an entire race. Writing about this important of a person is really tiresome and it takes sometime to process the fact that one has been endowed with this amazing opportunity. For me, It all began with a simple google search of Katherine Johnson's name. Portrait of Katherine Johnson via. NASA I like to view this as a simple google search that changed the way I perceived the world of Mathematics. An African-American lady who was rejected the first time she applied to NACA ( National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which was later changed to NASA ) changed the way I view Mathematics. Katherine Johnson was simply put an extraordinaire. She was an amazing Mathematician who helped NASA lay it's foundations for Space Travel and also is an inspiration to many and one of the very few awardee of Presidential Medal of Freedom ( ...

Mathematics in Criminal Justice

“There’s a dead body inside the hotel room!!! I’m really scared… Please arrive on time.” The police did arrive, but not quite on time. By the time they arrived, people had already gathered outside Hotel Chandani with a stressed look on their faces. The police entered the room and saw a man stained with blood on his head, and on his back — they immediately declared him dead seeing no signs of life whatsoever. “Definitely not a gunshot” - a police officer insisted as if he was a hundred percent sure. Immediately after, another police officer reached the dead body and measured his temperature while the other officers looked around if the murderer left some clue. The police stayed in the hotel for another hour and a half: some closely inspecting the crime scene, some talking to the owner (who found it difficult to even utter a word), and some asking the gathered mass to return to their places. Before leaving the hotel, the same officer who to...

Why 2πrh?

Why 2πrh? Do cylinders fascinate you? They do, for me. But then, one thing that I didn’t understand but was asked to memorize in my middle school was the formula for the Curved Surface Area of a cylinder. CSA = 2πrh, that’s what I knew. Never was I told why that particular combination of parameters that I well understood spitted out the area of the curved portion of the cylinder, for that matter. So, today, let’s ask ourselves: Why 2πrh? On the left is a cylinder and on the right is the same cylinder with the shaded region being the part whose area needs to be calculated. Now, let’s take a pair of scissors, and cut the cylinder vertically starting from one point in the upper circumference and reaching another point, exactly down of the upper point, in the lower circumference. Then, we flatten the pieces cut against the back wall. You’ll soon see why we are doing this small piece of Origami-c exercise As you do the folding as instructed, what you will get is a rectangle and t...

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