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There are 59 sheets and no required order. If you would rather not choose, here is a first thirty nights that alternates the school course with new ideas and keeps the surprises coming. Each is ten to fifteen minutes; the starred problem is extra. Tick each night off.
The first thirty nights
- Proof by contradiction
- Why the quadratic formula works
- Induction: infinitely many dominoes
- A logarithm is an exponent
- The slope of a curve
- SOHCAHTOA grows up: the unit circle
- What a positive test really means
- What the roots are telling you
- Counting without counting
- Bayes' theorem Recall: in night 7's test, which number was the base rate, and why did it matter so much?
- Sequences, series, and Gauss's trick
- Multiplying is rotating
- Compound interest, mortgages and why the casino wins
- Conditional probability and trees
- The number e
- Shift, stretch, flip
- Area under a curve, Archimedes' way Recall: on night 5 a secant became a tangent as h shrank to zero. What shrinks to zero tonight?
- Why a violin doesn't sound like a flute
- Standard deviation and the bell curve
- The pigeonhole principle
- Adding up forever
- Similar triangles and the proof habit
- Matrices that move the plane
- Elo ratings and regression to the mean
- Factor, remainder, and the cubes
- Markov chains and how Google ranked the web Recall: on night 23, multiplying two matrices meant doing one move after another. What does one move after another mean here?
- Circle theorems, with proofs
- Some infinities are bigger
- R₀ and herd immunity
- Groups: the mathematics of symmetry
After night thirty, pick whatever looks interesting. The Connections sheets are good for tired evenings: more reading, less calculation. The demos are for screens, five minutes each.
Three short routes
If you would rather follow one idea than keep switching, each route below builds a single idea over three nights. Do them in order; each sheet names the earlier one it leans on. The recall line is a question to answer out loud before you start that sheet.
Primes to a padlock
- Clock arithmetic (grade 6, a quick revisit)
- Fermat's little theorem
- RSA: a lock anyone can close Recall first: why does multiplying the nonzero residues by a number coprime to the modulus just rearrange them?
Rotations to music
- Multiplying is rotating
- e to the i pi Recall first: what happens to the angle when you multiply two complex numbers?
- Why a violin doesn't sound like a flute
Slope to area
- The slope of a curve
- Area under a curve, Archimedes' way
- Area and slope undo each other Recall first: what did the slope sheet send to zero, and what did the area sheet send to infinity?
Tick-off card
Every grade 10 sheet. Print this page, stick it somewhere visible, and tick them off. Finish a whole track and tell someone.
Sharpen
- Why the quadratic formula works
- What the roots are telling you
- Functions as machines
- Shift, stretch, flip
- A logarithm is an exponent
- Where curves meet
- Factor, remainder, and the cubes
- Rational functions and asymptotes
- Roots, rational exponents and rationalising
- Similar triangles and the proof habit
- SOHCAHTOA grows up: the unit circle
- Circle theorems, with proofs
- Geometry with coordinates
- Sequences, series, and Gauss's trick
- Conditional probability and trees
- Standard deviation and the bell curve
- Inequalities, absolute value, and sign charts
- Volumes: why the cone is a third
Around the corner
- Proof by contradiction
- Induction: infinitely many dominoes
- The pigeonhole principle
- Counting without counting
- Fermat's little theorem
- RSA: a lock anyone can close
- Multiplying is rotating
- e to the i pi
- The number e
- The slope of a curve
- Area under a curve, Archimedes' way
- Adding up forever
- Some infinities are bigger
- Matrices that move the plane
- Vectors and the dot product
- Slicing a cone
- Pythagorean triples and Fermat's margin
- Continued fractions and the golden ratio
- Graphs: trees, planarity and Ramsey
- Game theory: the prisoner's dilemma
- Bayes' theorem
- Markov chains and how Google ranked the web
- Random walks and the gambler's ruin
- The logistic map and chaos
- Information and entropy
- Algorithms and big-O
- Geometry on a sphere and beyond
- Groups: the mathematics of symmetry
- Area and slope undo each other
- Why π knows whether a fraction cancels
- Lights Out: a puzzle you can prove impossible
Connections
- Why a violin doesn't sound like a flute
- Kepler's laws and measuring the universe
- Parabolas in flight
- Compound interest, mortgages and why the casino wins
- What a positive test really means
- R₀ and herd immunity
- Perspective, projective geometry and the golden ratio myth
- Elo ratings and regression to the mean
- How GPS knows where you are
- Fair shares: apportionment and Arrow's theorem