11th February 2016

Founder of Kindergarten System

In 1837, Friedrich Froebel established the ‘Play and Activity Institute’ based on his tested method of activity based learning. He renamed the institute ‘Kindergarten’ in 1840. The word kindergarten means the garden for the children (kind or ‘child’ and garten or ‘Garden’), a place where they can observe  nature and interact with it. It also means the garden of children, where the children can grow and develop freely without any interference from political or social imperatives.

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11th February 2016

What alters the length of a day?

Researchers have found that periodic jumps generated in the earth’s core change the length of a day every 5.9 years on our planet. They found that variations in the length of the day over periods of between one and ten years are caused by processes in the Earth’s core. The Earth rotates once per day, but the length of this day varies.
A year 300 million years ago would have lasted for about 250 days and a day would have lasted for about 21 hours. Hence, the Earth’s six-year twitch alters the length of the day.

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11th February 2016

‘The Elements’ – A pithy list song by Tom Lehrer

Tom Lehrer, born in 1928, a retired mathematician, lecturer and satirical songwriter got a number of successful albums released during the 1950s and 1960s. One of them was ‘The Elements’. It is a song about the 102-element periodic table to the tune of the Major-General’s Song from The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan. The lines of the song consist of the names of the elements. The first two and the last two lines are as under –

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11th February 2016

Reckon your knowledge about transcendental numbers

A transcendental number is the one which cannot be obtained as roots of an equation with rational coefficients like, 3x2 + 2x + 4 = 0.
The mathematical constant or Euler’s number ‘e’ and ‘pi’ are examples of transcendental numbers. The proof of above proposition is not very simple, which is partly the reason why ‘e’ and ‘p’ could not be shown to be so respectively till 1873 and 1882. Both ‘e’ and ‘p’ are non-recurring and non-terminating decimals. The values of ‘e’ and ‘p’, correct up to fifty decimal places, are respectively.

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