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Word histories: maximum, minimum and Latin | Tangente
"Optimum," "maximum," "minimum," "extremum": Latin vocabulary has certainly been plundered for terms denoting the extreme values of a function.
The moving sofa problem
Moving house always brings a host of problems... including mathematical puzzles! One of them was formalized by Leo Moser in 1966.
Plane coloring and the minimum chromatic number | Tangente
In 1950, American mathematician Edward Nelson (1932–2014) proposed an entertaining coloring problem.
Optimal packing of squares in a larger square | Tangente
You'll never arrange your boxes the same way again!
On persistence
Apply the same algorithm to the digits of a number, then repeat the process with the digits of the result, and you encounter the notion of persistence… and the questions it raises.
Using the derivative to hit bottom
Finding the lowest point on a given curve requires considering how the curve is approximated by a line near one of its points. This is where the tangent enters the picture
Hills and valleys
A real-life situation or a physics experiment generally depends on several parameters, not just one. We therefore need a deeper understanding of variation in this multidimensional setting. Partial derivatives provide just that.