Jacques Bair
56 articles published in Tangente
History and CultureN°59Apr 25, 2016Euclid: an introduction to the straight line
Written more than two thousand years ago, Euclid's Elements is a foundational text of classical geometry. The concept of the straight line is central to it. Let's meet this scholar of ancient Greece and take a closer look at his view of the straight line.
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Math for everyoneN°59Apr 25, 2016Geometry or numbers? The number line
It is easy to picture numbers as points on an oriented line with an origin. Yet this construction must be carried out with some rigor—especially if we want to represent infinitesimal or infinite numbers!
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N°58Feb 23, 2016The saga of medical curves (3)
Curves for prediction
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KnowledgeN°58Feb 22, 2016Markov: chains of hope
For a disease transmitted by insects, a treatment campaign may not necessarily prove effective in the long term, as a particular case study using the mathematical concept of a Markov chain will show.
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N°58Feb 16, 2016The saga of medical curves (1)
Curves for visualizing medical data.
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N°58Feb 16, 2016Body mass index
According to the World Health Organization, the Quetelet index—also known as body mass index, or BMI—provides an indicator of the "ideal" weight for good health. Why is this index used, and how did Quetelet devise it?
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Math for everyoneN°168Jan 12, 2016The choice of serve in tennis
A probabilistic model can help a tennis player choose which type of serve to use. Applied to the final of the last Davis Cup, which pitted Belgium against England.
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Math for everyoneN°168Dec 21, 2015Plausible conjectures… that turn out to be false!
We often assume that the only mistakes good mathematicians make are trivial slips caused by momentary inattention, such as errors in simple calculations. Yet some have put forward mathematical conjectures that proved false—sometimes spectacularly so.
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