"John Rumm" wrote in message
et...
wrote:
On 23 Jul, 08:39, Andy Wade wrote:

Hence if you can prove
the bisection of the angle and side above and accept Pythagoras (which
can be proved in several ways)

I think that is one of the few mathematical proofs I ever mastered! ;-)

This was second form stuff when I was at school. It's a bit worrying to
read things like

My 1988 GCSE Maths didn't stretch to the relationships of Pythagoras
and trig. Why does sqrt(3)/2 = cos(30deg)?
(Discuss.)

I did GCE O level maths in '83 or '84, and don't recall trig getting much
beyond basic right angle triangle stuff, with a possible requirement to be
able to use the sine or cosine rules. I was not sufficiently a fan of
maths (at the time) to take it at A level.


I was lucky in that I enjoyed doing my GCE O level and did go on to do an A
level. I bumped into my A level teacher 20 years after doing my A level and
took the time to tell her she was the best teacher I ever had (she was no
longer teaching and was interviewing my wife for a job when I bumped into
her). I have just dragged some of my old schoolbooks out of the loft to help
a friends lad out who is starting A level next term.

She used to do maths things that were not on the course, just for fun.
Learning that any recurring decimal can be written as a fraction is my
favourite

eg .123123123 recurring or any other numbers (I have used 3 digits here but
you can use more eg .1234512345) will always be a fraction if

(time to use letters for numbers and remember that these are recurring
decimals)

..abcabcabc will be the fraction abc/999
..abcdabcdabcd will will be the fraction abcd/9999.

Adam