Fabien Aoustin
140 articles published in Tangente
Math for everyoneN°215Dec 22, 2023Maths through song
"Today, we're doing maths!" That is the message Adrien Deslypper and Stéphane Delobel (along with a few accomplices), two high school teachers from Hauts-de-France, bring to their students every day.
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History and CultureN°215Dec 22, 20232024: a new year with many properties
What spectacular mathematical advances, major scientific discoveries and gains in knowledge does the new year have in store for us? It is hard to say! What is certain is that the natural number 2024 abounds in wonderful arithmetic and combinatorial properties…
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History and CultureN°215Dec 21, 2023Mathematicians make progress on coloring
Coloring problems are often very simple to state and may appeal to many amateur mathematicians. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately?—they conceal deep difficulties that continue to tax the mathematical community. A new breakthrough was made recently.
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Math for everyoneN°87Aug 24, 2023Sorting isn't so simple…
When a collection of data contains different values, one common task is to sort them—that is, to arrange them in a given order: the usual numerical order, lexicographic order as in a dictionary, or any other order defined by a total ordering relation.
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Math for everyoneN°87Aug 24, 2023More means
The arithmetic, quadratic, geometric and harmonic means (among many others) are all examples of a general family: the power means. They satisfy a well-known chain of inequalities.
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Math for everyoneN°87Aug 24, 2023Cauchy–Schwarz, even in graphs!
Take ten points and join some of them with line segments, but never form a triangle (that is, a triangle whose vertices are among the original ten points). What is the maximum number of segments you can draw?
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Math for everyoneN°87Aug 24, 2023Order amid disorder
Take a random sequence of numbers. It is unlikely that they will all be in increasing or decreasing order from the outset. Can we nevertheless hope to extract perfectly ordered subsequences? Yes—but they may not be as long as we would like!
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Math for everyoneN°87Aug 23, 2023A tale of neatly ordered means
“The” mean of two numbers is defined “naturally” according to the context. It is not always the familiar arithmetic mean! Several different notions coexist and are closely interconnected, as Liouville, Cauchy and Jensen clearly understood.
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History and CultureN°211Apr 23, 2023Hats off to ein stein!
Some craftspeople have become masters of the art of tiling, such as those who were commissioned to decorate the Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain. This inevitably raises geometric questions. Which tiles can cover the plane? What symmetries emerge?
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History and CultureN°211Apr 23, 2023Charred manuscripts, a prize and maths
The devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, described by Pliny the Younger (61–c. 113), not only destroyed Pompeii but also ravaged the nearby city of Herculaneum.
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Math for everyoneN°85Feb 20, 2023A unit of pressure
Pressure—the magnitude of a force per unit area—is often measured in pascals, denoted Pa.
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Math for everyoneN°85Feb 20, 2023A Pascal-inspired teaching tool
The best way to grasp the basic idea behind the Pascaline is to try it for yourself. Unfortunately, playing with the few surviving models held in museums is obviously out of the question.
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