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Welcome to the web page for the book “How to Improve your Maths Skills”. On this page you can find fully-worked solutions to all the exercises in the book, and some further, more practical questions for you to try. You can also contact me with any comments, suggestions or queries, and there are a few extra links and things for you to do as well. Please click on one of the links to get started!
On this page, you can find fully worked solutions to every question in the book. Please click on the chapter you need below:
Further things of interest
Graph paper
No graph paper? Don’t worry, you can download a printable sheet (pdf format) here
The largest prime number known
Although there must be infinitely many prime numbers, the largest prime number we know at the time of writing is the number 243112609 – 1 which is almost 13 million digits long. To try to put this into context, the number of atoms in the known universe is only around 1080, which when written is just 81 digits long (1 followed by 80 zeros). You can help the search for even larger ones! GIMPS is a project allowing ordinary people to run searches on their computer - if you are interested check out their website here
How to remember pi
In the book, we mentioned that a phrase like “hey I want a pizza” can be used to help remember the special mathematical number
π
(pi), as it consists of words of length 3, 1, 4, 1, 5, soπ
is approximated to 3.1415. This is called piphology. Look atπ
to 1000 decimal places in the book – can you create something longer? The longest I know is “how I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics” which gives 3.14159265358979. If you think you have something really good, feel free to send it to me via the contact page!Tricks for checking factors
There are quick ways to check if a small number divides into a big number. You might not have known all of the following:
Learning these sort of rules can make things fast for you (and impress people as well!)
Maths can be fun!
I know you probably never thought it, but maths can be fun! There are lots of interesting questions that you can find. If you come across any maths-related questions that you think are particularly interesting, feel free to send them to via the contact link page.