What’s the connection between the size of a city and the number of gas stations in it? How would you describe this relationship? How would you try to visualize and understand it? Strengthen your algebra, geometry and thinking skills by learning about fascinating mathematical relations from daily life in the free online course “Maths for Humans: Inverse Relations and Power Laws”
Maths for Humans: Inverse Relations and Power Laws – Course Content
Study real-world connections using algebra and geometry
In this free online course, we’ll look at a wide spectrum of interesting, and often surprising, mathematical relationships in our everyday world.
The course includes the following topics:
- Inverse relations, which complement direct relationships;
- Power laws that occur in economics, physics and biology;
- Curious applications of the logarithm function;
- Visualize these real-world interconnections using graph paper and pencil, and also modern graphing software such as GeoGebra and Desmos.
The functions and graphs in this course help us to make predictions, evaluate actions and test theories about population distributions, the frequencies of common words in texts, scaling laws in biology and even detecting fraud.
Target Audience
This course is aimed at:
- Senior high school students wanting to strengthen and enrich their understanding of a core pre-calculus topic;
- New undergraduates wishing to review and consolidate their background in algebra and geometry in preparation for STEM studies;
- High school maths teachers;
- Anyone with an interest in mathematics and a curiosity about how mathematics is intertwined with the real world.
Summary of Main Course Features
- Educators: Norman Wildberger and Daniel Mansfield
- Publisher: University of New South Wales
- Duration: 4 weeks x 3 hours per week
- Start Date: 22 August 2016
- Certificate: Yes
Price: Free
Visit the Course Page