Project Mathematics!
), is a series of educational video modules and accompanying workbooks for teachers, developed at the California Institute of Technology to help teach basic principles of mathematics to high school students.
series of videos is a teaching aid for teachers to help students understand the basics of geometry and trigonometry.
The series was developed by Tom M. Apostol and James F. Blinn, both from the California Institute of Technology.
Apostol led the production of the series, while Blinn provided the computer animation used to depict the ideas beings discussed.
Blinn mentioned that part of his inspiration was the Bell Lab Science Series of films from the 1950s.
Workbooks are also available to accompany the videos and to assist teachers in presenting the material to their students.
The videos are distributed as either 9 VHS videotapes or 3 DVDs, and include a history of mathematics and examples of how math is used in real world applications.
Today, we know of the Pythagorean theorem because of Euclid's Elements, a set of 13 books on mathematics—from around 300 BCE—and the knowledge it contained has been used for more than 2000 years.
Euclid's proof is described in book 1, proposition 47 and uses the idea of equal areas along with shearing and rotating triangles.
The volume and surface area of a cylinder, cone sphere and torus are calculated using pi.
Pi is also used in calculating planetary orbit times, gaussian curves and alternating current.
Archimedes discovered that the area of the circle equals the square of its radius times pi.
These formulas used infinite series and trigonometric functions to calculate pi to hundreds of decimal places.
Another reason is to determine if pi is a specific fraction, which is a ratio of two integers called a rational number that has a repeating pattern of digits when expressed in decimal form.
In the 18th century, Johann Lambert found that pi cannot be a ratio and is therefore an irrational number.
Explains the law of sines and cosines how they relate to sides and angles of a triangle.
[7] Describes the addition formulas of sines and cosines and discusses the history of Ptolemy's Almagest.
series was created and directed by Tom M. Apostol and James F. Blinn, both from the California Institute of Technology.
The project was originally titled Mathematica but was changed to avoid confusion with the mathematics software package.
video tapes, DVDs and workbooks are primarily distributed to teachers through the California Institute of Technology bookstore and were popular to a standard that the bookstore hired an extra person just for processing orders of the series.
[12] An estimated 140,000 of the tapes and DVDs were sent to educational institutions around the world, and have been viewed by approximately 10 million people until 2003.[when?
][19] The series is also distributed through the Mathematical Association of America and NASA's Central Operation of Resources for Educators (CORE).
In 2017, Caltech made the entirety of the series, as well as three SIGGRAPH demo videos, available on YouTube.
[24] A web-based version of the materials was funded by a third grant from the National Science Foundation and was in phase 1, as of 2010[update].
