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Category Archives: arithmetic
An exploration of forward differences for bored elementary school students
Last week I made a mathematics worksheet for my 8-year-old son, whose school is closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. I’m republishing it here so others can use it for similar purposes. Figurate numbers and forward differences There are lots … Continue reading
Posted in arithmetic, teaching
Tagged coronavirus, difference, elementary, forward, homeschool, worksheet
1 Comment
A new counting system
0 = t__ough 1 = t_rough 2 = th_ough 3 = through So, for example, trough through tough though though. English is so strange.
A combinatorial proof: PIE a la mode!
Continuing from my last post in this series, we’re trying to show that , where is defined as which is what we get when we start with a sequence of consecutive th powers and repeatedly take successive differences. Recall that … Continue reading
Posted in arithmetic, combinatorics, proof
Tagged consecutive, difference, function, integers, matching, powers
Comments Off on A combinatorial proof: PIE a la mode!
Order of operations considered harmful
[The title is a half-joking reference to Edsger Dijkstra’s classic paper, Go To Statement Considered Harmful; see here for more context.] Everyone is probably familiar with the so-called “order of operations”, which is a collection of rules that reflect conventions … Continue reading
Posted in arithmetic, teaching
Tagged harmful, operations, order, parentheses, parsing, perform, trees
9 Comments
A combinatorial proof: counting bad functions
In a previous post we derived the following expression: . We are trying to show that , in order to show that starting with a sequence of consecutive th powers and repeatedly taking successive differences will always result in . … Continue reading
Posted in arithmetic, combinatorics, proof
Tagged consecutive, difference, function, integers, matching, powers
1 Comment
A combinatorial proof: functions and matchings
We’re trying to prove the following equality (see my previous post for a recap of the story so far): In particular we’re trying to show that the two sides of this equation correspond to two different ways to count the … Continue reading
Posted in arithmetic, combinatorics, proof
Tagged consecutive, difference, function, integers, matching, powers
5 Comments
A combinatorial proof: the story so far
In my last post I reintroduced this seemingly odd phenomenon: Start with consecutive integers and raise them all to the th power. Then repeatedly take pairwise differences (i.e. subtract the first from the second, and the second from the third, … Continue reading
Posted in arithmetic, combinatorics, proof
Tagged consecutive, difference, integers, powers
1 Comment
A combinatorial proof: reboot!
More than seven years ago I wrote about a curious phenomenon, which I found out about from Patrick Vennebush: if you start with a sequence of consecutive th powers, and repeatedly take pairwise differences, you always end up with , … Continue reading
Posted in arithmetic, combinatorics, proof
Tagged consecutive, difference, integers, powers
11 Comments
Computing the Euler totient function, part 4: totient of prime powers
I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus as I’ve been travelling with my family for the past month. So here’s a recap. Our story so far Recall that the Euler totient function, , counts how many numbers from to … Continue reading
Posted in arithmetic, computation, counting
Tagged Euler, multiplicative, totient
Comments Off on Computing the Euler totient function, part 4: totient of prime powers
Computing the Euler totient function, part 3: proving phi is multiplicative
We are trying to show that the Euler totient function , which counts how many numbers from to share no common factors with , is multiplicative, that is, whenever and share no common factors. In my previous post, we looked … Continue reading
The Math Less Traveled 