Some answers to your questions!

As you may be asking to yourself why things are like that in algebra, I found a page in which things are very well explained, you can find some exercises as well, so it´s pretty useful.

KhanAcademy

If you´re completely lost in this world and you don´t know where to start, I recommend you to look this page, here, you will have a second chance to learn the basics of algebra.

Algebra for Dummies

Well, as always I hope you find this useful! See you!

The father of algebra

Diophantus, and Alexandrian Greek mathematician, is considered as the father of Algebra, he wrote the series Arithmetica, where he deals with some algebraic equations, it was a collection of thirteen books, but nowadays, there are only six left. Those thirteen books had a total of 130 exercises about determinate and indeterminate equations. A curious fact of Diouphantus: his Epitaph says:

Cover of a 1621 edition

'Here lies Diophantus,' the wonder behold.

Through art algebraic, the stone tells how old:

'God gave him his boyhood one-sixth of his life,

One twelfth more as youth while whiskers grew rife;

And then yet one-seventh ere marriage begun;

In five years there came a bouncing new son.

Alas, the dear child of master and sage

After attaining half the measure of his father's life chill fate took him. After consoling his fate by the science of numbers for four years, he ended his life.'

If we write the puzzle, and solve for "x", it will give us that his age was 84.

x = x/6 + x/12 + x/7 + 5 + x/2 + 4 = 84

Interview with Jose Antonio Fernandez

Today, I have the pleasure to bring you part of a interview I had with the mathematician Jose Antonio Fernandez, the first algebra teacher I had.

Q:It´s been a long time since you teached me how to work with matrixes.. Have you changed something in the way you present algebra to your students?
A:Not much, I always try to show them algebra as a game, and I teach how to play with matrixes, that´s why many of my students learn without effort.

Q: How important do you think is algebra in real world?
A:Well, as I´m an algebra teacher, my answer it´s obvious, but the applications are there, everyone can look for them in internet, if anyone thinks it´s a waste of time, I would recommend that guy to leave the engineering, it is essential for an engineer to be comfortable in the use of algebra, as many of the asnwer you guys will find in the future are there, but you need to know where to look for them.

Q:What would you say to someone that is not good at algebra?
A: Algebra is not difficult at all, its a matter of work, of daily work, like almost all the subjects. When you study this subject day by day (at the beginnign it can be hard) you start to understand things, like a wheel that starts to turn.

Q:After having taught for more than 40 years, what are you going to do now?
A: I´ve been thinking these years a lot... And I have finally decide to spend my time in writing books, I´ve always respected the writers, there is a lot of work behind every book.


My apologies about the shortness of the interview, but we didn´t have time for much more. Hope you like it anyway! See you!

VIDEO:How to solve a determinant exercise

Today I bring you a video in which I explain how to do determinants... Hope you like it and find it useful!

Huuuuge thanks to Rafael Moranchel, the director, coordinator, camera man and executive producer. Thank you for giving me this oportunity!

Face recognition

One of the most incredible applications of algebra in real life is the facial recognition, humans tend to use faces to recognize individuals, fortunately, the advancements in computing capabilities in the past few decades let us to do similar recognitions automatically. The concept of this are the eigenvectors, in 1988, Kirby and Sirobich discovered that there were necessary less than one hundred of values to encode any face, this was a huge progress, as in the beginning the markers used to automate the recognition were subjective (hair colour or lip thickness) and these solutions had to be computed manually. This discovery accelerated the development of this technology. Years ago, the face recognition algorithms used simple geometric models, but the recognition process has now evolved into a science of sophisticated mathematical representations and matching processes.

We will continue talking about this in the next posts for sure as it´s a truly amazing field. See you!

Introduction to linear algebra

Here I bring you a video that helped me a lot to understand these world of numbers and matrixes.

Hope you like it and see you in my next post!

Origins of Algebra

For my first post I want to introduce you to Algebra by telling a little bit of the origin of it.
The history of Algebra began in ancient Egypt and Babylon 2000 years ago. People started to solve very simple linear and quadratic equations as well as some indeterminate and quadratic functions in the same way that is taught nowadays.
Later on, in Alexandria, Diophantus writed the book Arithmetica, solving much more complex equations, egyptian mathematicians however, were more interested in solving linear equations only.

Ancient civilizations wrote out algebraic expressions using only occasional abbreviations, but by medieval times Islamic mathematicians were able to talk about arbitrarily high powers of the unknown x, and work out the basic algebra of polynomials (without yet using modern symbolism).