Many of you will be aware that Burkard and I had a Maths Masters column in The Age for a number of years. We got a couple books out of the columns, and it now seems time to make the columns live again.* Burkard has done so, and the columns can be found here.
Note that the columns typically contain a number of links and undoubtedly many of the links are now dead. Readers should feel free to point out any dead links (as a comment below, or by an email), and I’ll slowly get around to fixing them.
In general, Burkard’s and my QEDcat site has been pretty dormant (although the we-think-it-is good stuff is still accessible). We have thoughts to revive the site although, to be truthful, we have lots of thoughts. We’ll see.
*) The columns were always live, as some would have discovered, but were semi-hidden.
“rarely proved” in Parabolic playtime (27 October 2014) is dead.
Correction, “rarely proved” is in the article How to cook a telescope.
Yep, figured it out. Will try to put in the replacement link soon.
Now fixed.
Good read, thanks for posting it.
Thanks so much. So much too read !!!
In teaching students about Pythagoras’s theorem, I quote the equation as
where 
is the length of the hypotenuse. This ensures that the three letters are written in lower case.
Also, I have noticed that many students quote Pythagoras’s theorem simply as
. They are shocked when I give them a counterexample.
I can see the point of the h, but I’m not sure it’s worth bucking such a strong convention. I don’t understand your second comment.
My second comment is that some students have the impression that Pythagoras’s theorem leads to a relation between
without knowing that these numbers are not just any numbers; they arise in the context of a right-angled triangle. They think that 
always equals 
for any 
.
Any student who imagines that has much greater issues to deal with.