EASY ARTHEMATIC TRICKS

1. The 11 Times Trick
We all know the trick when multiplying by ten – add 0 to the end of the number, but did you know there is an equally easy trick for multiplying a two digit number by 11? This is it:

Take the original number and imagine a space between the two digits (in this example we will use 52:

5_2

Now add the two numbers together and put them in the middle:

5_(5+2)_2

That is it – you have the answer: 572.

If the numbers in the middle add up to a 2 digit number, just insert the second number and add 1 to the first:

9_(9+9)_9

(9+1)_8_9

10_8_9

1089 – It works every time.


2. Quick Square
If you need to square a 2 digit number ending in 5, you can do so very easily with this trick. Mulitply the first digit by itself + 1, and put 25 on the end. That is all!

252 = (2x(2+1)) & 25

2 x 3 = 6

625


3. Multiply by 5
Most people memorize the 5 times tables very easily, but when you get in to larger numbers it gets more complex – or does it? This trick is super easy.

Take any number, then divide it by 2 (in other words, halve the number). If the result is whole, add a 0 at the end. If it is not, ignore the remainder and add a 5 at the end. It works everytime:

2682 x 5 = (2682 / 2) & 5 or 0

2682 / 2 = 1341 (whole number so add 0)

13410

Let’s try another:

5887 x 5

2943.5 (fractional number (ignore remainder, add 5)

29435

NATIONAL MATHEMATICS YEAR

In India and in Nigeria the year 2012 CE is celebrated and observed as the National Mathematics Year. In India the National Mathematics Year is celebrated as a tribute to the mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan who was born on 22 December 1887 and whose 125th birthday falls on 22 December 2012.[1][2] In Nigeria, the year 2012 is observed as National Mathematics Year as part of the Federal Government’s effort to promote and popularise the study of mathematics.[3] [4]
[edit]
National Mathematics Year in India

The decision to designate the year 2012 CE as National Mathematics Year was announced by Dr Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India, during the inaugural ceremony of the celebrations to mark the 125th birth anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan held at the Madras University Centenary Auditorium on 26 February 2012. The Prime Minister also announced that December 22 would be celebrated as National Mathematics Day from 2012 on.

An Organising Committee with Professor M.S. Raghunathan, President of the Ramanujan Mathematical Society as chair, and Professor Dinesh Singh, Secretary of the Ramanujan Mathematical Society as secretary, has been formed to formulate and implement programmes and projects as part of the observance of the National Mathematics Year. A National Committee with Minister for Human Resource Development Kapil Sibal as the chair supervises the activities of the Organising Committee.[5]
[edit]
National Mathematics Year in Nigeria

In Nigeria, the various activities planned as part of the celebration of National Mathematics Year would be centred around the theme Mathematics: The Key to Transformation. The events were inaugurated on 1 March 2012 at a function in Musa Yar’adua Dome, Abuja. Thirteen projects of national importance are planned as part of the celebrations.

SCIENCE NEWS

1.Uncertainty not so certain after all
Physicists may need to tweak what they think they know about Werner Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle.

Measuring light particles doesn’t push them as far into the realm of quantum fuzziness as once thought, new research suggests. The work doesn’t invalidate the principle underlying all of modern quantum theory, but may have implications for supersecure cryptography and other quantum applications.

“The real Heisenberg uncertainty principle is alive and well,” says Lee Rozema, a graduate student at the University of Toronto whose team reports the finding in the Sept. 7 Physical Review Letters. “It’s really just this [one aspect] that needs to be updated.”

In its most famous articulation, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that it’s possible at a given moment to know either the position or momentum of a particle, but not both. This relationship can be written out mathematically. But Heisenberg first came up with the idea in a slightly different fashion using slightly different mathematics. That version says the more you disturb a particle, the less precisely you can measure a particular property of it, and vice versa.

As an example, Heisenberg imagined shining particles of light on an electron and, by watching how the light bounced off it, deducing the position of the electron. But each time the light particles impart a little of their momentum to the electron, thus blurring how well scientists can measure the system. “This is how Heisenberg thought, but it wasn’t what was rigorously proven later,” says Rozema. “Physicists quite often confuse the two.”

Heisenberg’s original version still works for the light/electron example, Rozema says, but not in more general cases — as most scientists have assumed.

In 2003, Japanese physicist Masanao Ozawa showed mathematically that Heisenberg’s first version couldn’t be right. Earlier this year, he and a research team at the University of Vienna reported lab experiments confirming this.

Now, the Toronto physicists have weighed in with what they call a more direct measurement. They took single light particles, or photons, and measured two directions in which the light waves oscillated. The first measurement was a “weak” probe, gently inquiring about oscillations in one direction and then the other. Then the scientists made a “strong” measurement, directly probing whether that first, weak measurement had disturbed the system.

By combining the weak and strong measurements, Rozema’s team showed that the measured oscillations did not fit the mathematics of Heisenberg’s first formulation of the uncertainty idea. In other words, shrinking the inaccuracy of a particle measurement (making it more precise) doesn’t disturb the particle quite as much as scientists had thought.

“It is possible for both the inaccuracy and the disturbance to be small, although not both strictly zero,” says Howard Wiseman, a physicist at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, who proposed the measurement the Toronto team used.

The discovery is important for anyone trying to build an unbreakable quantum code. Quantum cryptography relies on the fact that eavesdroppers would be spotted by the disturbance they make. If the disturbance is smaller than expected, then eavesdroppers might be harder to detect.

“The new relation will open up new science and technology in the field of quantum information,” says Ozawa, now of Nagoya University. “It also presents a profound philosophical problem.”


2.Brain’s white matter diminished in isolated mice
Changes in the brains of mice that were isolated as young pups may help explain the profound behavioral problems of severely neglected children. The mouse experiments suggest that neglect during a specific developmental window irreversibly stunts brain development, researchers report in the Sept. 14 Science.

Over the last decade, researchers have catalogued brain deficits and behavioral problems in Romanian orphans who were raised in bare-bones environments with little social stimulation. Many of these children display hyperactivity, impulsivity and compulsive behavior such as arm flapping. Although superficially friendly, these kids have trouble forming meaningful relationships.

By studying mice that had been isolated early in life, researchers led by Gabriel Corfas of Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School hoped to uncover how social deprivation can affect the developing brain. After the mice had weaned, the researchers put them into one of three environments: One was a deluxe suite, enriched with fresh toys every other day and populated by friends of similar ages, one was a standard laboratory cage holding four mice, and one was a holding cell for total isolation.

After two weeks, mice in the deluxe suite and the regular cage showed no abnormalities in their behavior or brains. But mice that were isolated showed big changes. These animals were socially stunted, showing less signs of exploratory behavior and a diminished working memory. What’s more, the researchers uncovered stunted development in the brain’s white matter, which helps nerve cells communicate.

In a brain region called the prefrontal cortex, isolated mice had less of a fatty insulating substance called myelin that wraps around nerve cells and helps carry their messages. This part of the brain is thought to be crucial for high-level tasks like social interactions. Myelin-making cells called oligodendrocytes were also stunted. Normally these cells have elaborate, winding tendrils full of complex branches. But isolated mice’s oligodendrocytes were smaller and less elaborate, with fewer branches. The result “shows how sensitive the development of myelin is to experience,” Corfas says.

The two-week period after weaning was critical. If isolation happened three weeks after weaning, the mice didn’t show these deficits. Nor could the isolation effects be reversed later by moving the isolated mice into a better situation.

“What I find fascinating is that this is the neurobiological counterpart of the behavioral changes,” says pediatric neurologist Harry Chugani of Wayne State University in Detroit and Children’s Hospital of Michigan.

This result echoes what Chugani and his colleagues have seen in their studies of neglected Romanian orphans. Children moved from an orphanage to a foster home before age 2 do much better than children removed later. During this window, social interaction has a profound effect on the brain, Chugani says. “The brain demands that you present it with a certain environment.”

Corfas and his team also turned up some clues about how social isolation can lead to these brain changes. When the team reduced production of a molecule called ErbB3 receptor protein, mice raised in an enriched environment acted more like mice raised in isolation. They also found that production of another protein, called neuregulin-1, is muted by isolation.

These molecules have been implicated in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, Corfas says, as have alterations in white matter in the brain — raising the possibility that the effects of social isolation could be similar to what happens in those disorders.

For now, Corfas says, the team is looking for a way to undo the harm.


3.Water boils sans bubbles
Dip your finger in a bucket of water and then quickly dip it in molten lead — you won’t get burned, thanks to an insulating layer of steam that forms around the finger. Chemists have now exploited this phenomenon, known as the Leidenfrost effect, to boil water without making bubbles.

The researchers covered a steel ball with Glaco Mirror Coat, a water-hating material, along with some other water-repelling chemicals. This turned the sphere’s exterior into a nanoscale mountain range peppered with deep valleys. Heating the sphere to 400º Celsius and dropping it in room-temperature water spurred boiling, but no furious bubbles, the team reports in Sept. 13 Nature. The water near the sphere became vapor that got trapped in the valleys on the sphere’s surface. Eventually this sheet of vapor slipped off and a new one formed.

Treating the surface of another sphere to make it water-loving had the opposite effect, locking the water in the violent bubbling phase. Manipulating this phase-chemistry could lead to tricks for reducing drag on ships or preventing forceful bubbling explosions in labs or kitchens.

STEPHEN HAWKING

Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA (born 8 January 1942)[1] is a British theoretical physicist and cosmologist, whose scientific books and public appearances have made him an academic celebrity. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts,[2] a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences,[3] and in 2009 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.[4]

Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge for 30 years, taking up the post in 1979 and retiring on 1 October 2009.[5][6] He is now Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and a Distinguished Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario.[7] He is known for his contributions to the fields of cosmology and quantum gravity, especially in the context of black holes. He has also achieved success with works of popular science in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general; these include the runaway best seller A Brief History of Time, which stayed on the British Sunday Times best-sellers list for a record-breaking 237 weeks.[8][9]

Hawking's key scientific works to date have included providing, with Roger Penrose, theorems regarding gravitational singularities in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes should emit radiation, which is today known as Hawking radiation (or sometimes as Bekenstein–Hawking radiation).[10]

Hawking has a motor neurone disease that is related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a condition that has progressed over the years and has left him almost completely.

EARLY LIFE
Stephen Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 to Dr. Frank Hawking, a research biologist, and Isobel Hawking. He had two younger sisters, Philippa and Mary, and an adopted brother, Edward.[11] Though Hawking's parents were living in North London, they moved to Oxford while his mother was pregnant with Stephen, desiring a safer location for the birth of their first child. (London was under attack at the time by the Luftwaffe.)[12] According to Hawking, a German V-2 missile struck only a few streets away.[13]

After Hawking was born, the family moved back to London, where his father headed the division of parasitology at the National Institute for Medical Research.[11] In 1950, Hawking and his family moved to St Albans, Hertfordshire, where he attended St Albans High School for Girls from 1950 to 1953. (At that time, boys could attend the Girls' school until the age of ten.)[14] From the age of eleven, he attended St Albans School, where he was a good, but not exceptional, student.[11] When asked later to name a teacher who had inspired him, Hawking named his mathematics teacher Dikran Tahta.[15] He maintains his connection with the school, giving his name to one of the four houses and to an extracurricular science lecture series. He has visited it to deliver one of the lectures and has also granted a lengthy interview to pupils working on the school magazine, The Albanian.

Hawking was always interested in science.[11] Inspired by his mathematics teacher, he originally wanted to study the subject at university. However, Hawking's father wanted him to apply to University College, Oxford, where his father had attended. As University College did not have a mathematics fellow at that time, it would not accept applications from students who wished to read that discipline. Hawking therefore applied to read natural sciences, in which he gained a scholarship. Once at University College, Hawking specialised in physics.[12] His interests during this time were in thermodynamics, relativity, and quantum mechanics. His physics tutor, Robert Berman, later said in The New York Times Magazine:

It was only necessary for him to know that something could be done, and he could do it without looking to see how other people did it. [...] He didn't have very many books, and he didn't take notes. Of course, his mind was completely different from all of his contemporaries.[11]

Hawking was passing, but his unimpressive study habits[16] resulted in a final examination score on the borderline between first and second class honours, making an "oral examination" necessary. Berman said of the oral examination:

And of course the examiners then were intelligent enough to realize they were talking to someone far more clever than most of themselves.[11]

After receiving his B.A. degree at Oxford in 1962, he stayed to study astronomy. He decided to leave when he found that studying sunspots, which was all the observatory was equipped for, did not appeal to him and that he was more interested in theory than in observation.[11] He left Oxford for Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he engaged in the study of theoretical astronomy and cosmology.

CAREER 
Almost as soon as he arrived at Cambridge, he started developing symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, known colloquially in the United States as Lou Gehrig's disease), a type of motor neurone disease which would cost him almost all neuromuscular control. During his first two years at Cambridge, he did not distinguish himself, but, after the disease had stabilised and with the help of his doctoral tutor, Dennis William Sciama, he returned to working on his PhD.[11]

Hawking was elected as one of the youngest Fellows of the Royal Society in 1974, was created a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1982, and became a Companion of Honour in 1989. Hawking is a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

In 1974, he accepted the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar visiting professorship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to work with his friend, Kip Thorne, who was a faculty member there.[17] He continues to have ties with Caltech, spending a month each year there since 1992.[18]

Hawking's achievements were made despite the increasing paralysis caused by the ALS. By 1974, he was unable to feed himself or get out of bed. His speech became slurred so that he could be understood only by people who knew him well. In 1985, he caught pneumonia and had to have a tracheotomy, which made him unable to speak at all. A Cambridge scientist built a device that enables Hawking to write onto a computer with small movements of his body, and then have a voice synthesiser speak what he has typed.[19

RESEARCH 
Hawking's principal fields of research are theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity.

In the late 1960s, he and his Cambridge friend and colleague, Roger Penrose, applied a new, complex mathematical model they had created from Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.[20] This led, in 1970, to Hawking proving the first of many singularity theorems; such theorems provide a set of sufficient conditions for the existence of a gravitational singularity in space-time. This work showed that, far from being mathematical curiosities which appear only in special cases, singularities are a fairly generic feature of general relativity.[21]

He supplied a mathematical proof, along with Brandon Carter, Werner Israel and D. Robinson, of John Wheeler's no-hair theorem – namely, that any black hole is fully described by the three properties of mass, angular momentum, and electric charge.

Hawking also suggested upon analysis of gamma ray emissions that after the Big Bang, primordial mini black holes were formed. With Bardeen and Carter, he proposed the four laws of black hole mechanics, drawing an analogy with thermodynamics. In 1974, he calculated that black holes should thermally create and emit subatomic particles, known today as Bekenstein-Hawking radiation, until they exhaust their energy and evaporate.[22]

In collaboration with Jim Hartle, Hawking developed a model in which the universe had no boundary in space-time, replacing the initial singularity of the classical Big Bang models with a region akin to the North Pole: one cannot travel north of the North Pole, as there is no boundary. While originally the no-boundary proposal predicted a closed universe, discussions with Neil Turok led to the realisation that the no-boundary proposal is also consistent with a universe which is not closed.

Along with Thomas Hertog at CERN, in 2006 Hawking proposed a theory of "top-down cosmology," which says that the universe had no unique initial state, and therefore it is inappropriate for physicists to attempt to formulate a theory that predicts the universe's current configuration from one particular initial state.[23] Top-down cosmology posits that in some sense, the present "selects" the past from a superposition of many possible histories. In doing so, the theory suggests a possible resolution of the fine-tuning question: It is inevitable that we find our universe's present physical constants, as the current universe "selects" only those past histories that led to the present conditions. In this way, top-down cosmology provides an anthropic explanation for why we find ourselves in a universe that allows matter and life, without invoking an ensemble of multiple universes.

Hawking's many other scientific investigations have included the study of quantum cosmology, cosmic inflation, helium production in anisotropic Big Bang universes, large N cosmology, the density matrix of the universe, topology and structure of the universe, baby universes, Yang-Mills instantons and the S matrix, anti de Sitter space, quantum entanglement and entropy, the nature of space and time, including the arrow of time, spacetime foam, string theory, supergravity, Euclidean quantum gravity, the gravitational Hamiltonian, Brans-Dicke and Hoyle-Narlikar theories of gravitation, gravitational radiation, and wormholes.

At a George Washington University lecture in honour of NASA's fiftieth anniversary, Hawking theorised on the existence of extraterrestrial life, believing that "primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare."[24]