A colleague from another department stopped by my office this morning with a question about parabolas and parabolic mirrors. In the simplest terms, his question was the following: When parallel rays reflect off a parabola, do they always converge to a focal point? As we can see in the diagram below, rays that are parallel…
Month: June 2009
The Japanese Theorem
[Update: I’ve written quite a bit more about this theorem since 2009. See this page for more details.] I’ve been playing with GeoGebra for the last few days. As an exercise I decided to create applets to demonstrate the extremely beautiful Japanese Theorem. The first appearance of the Japanese theorem was as a Sangaku problem….
David Richeson: Division by Zero 