Project work has become a major constituent of Applied Mathematics courses at most British polytechnics and universities. There is a general consensus among academics as to what constitutes a project, how to discover and vet suitable projects, what their value is as a teaching aid, and how a student’s project work should be assessed.

This article looks at some of the history of “Leibniz's series”

and at Newton's riposte in a letter to Leibniz, the Epistola Posterior:

On the way we shall take in Gregory's well known contribution to the problem, and Newton's own description of how he discovered the binomial theorem using a method that has considerable appeal in classrooms today. For light relief Newton's apples will make an entrance. I have tried to track down as many copies of the original manuscripts as possible, as these have a great motivating effect on students. Knowledgeable readers will realise that this article is really an extended review of three magnificent sources, The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, edited by D.T. Whiteside, Leibniz in Paris 1672-1676, by J.E. Hofmann, and The Correspondence of Isaac Newton edited by H.W. Turnbull. My interest in the history of mathematics stems from a conversation with Professor Whiteside at the MA conference at Leicester in 1990, during which it became clear to me that despite having read and digested the works of Bell, Kline and Boyer, I knew nothing of the history of the calculus I was supposed to be teaching.

In certain computer applications to engineering problems such as the automatic control of machine tools the computing equipment derives its input in digital form, from, for example, an angle-indicating device on a rotating shaft. The indicating device may take the form of a multiple commutator or a coded disc read by photoelectric means. Since the shaft is rotating at mechanical speeds and the reading device is operating at electronic speeds a possibility of false readings exists when for example a change from 1999 to 2000 is taking place. In fact any of the readings 1999, 1990, 1900, 1000 or 2000 may occur in the same sort of way that a mileage recorder could be misread under similar circumstances.

The following is a well known pursuit problem: n bugs are at rest at the vertices of a regular polygon. At a certain instant each bug starts crawling towards its neighbour on the right with a constant speed, always altering its course so as to be headed directly towards its neighbour. How long does it take for the bugs to meet at the center of the polygon and what paths do they trace out in getting there? The earliest reference I could find to this problem was in a collection of mathematical puzzles edited by L.A.Graham. A more recent reference to it occurs in the amusing and informative collection of geometrical curiosities by David Wells. The “n-bug” problem was also discussed briefly in two of Martin Gardner’s columns in Scientific American. The cover of the July 65 issue of that magazine shows the equiangular spirals traced out by four bugs as they “square dance” their way towards their tryst at the centre.

Mr. A. M. Cohen in his article (The Mathematical Gazette, LIII, Feb. 1969, p. 41) makes some suggestions for school work in numerical methods and number theory. These prompt me to describe some work actually done in which, for reasons which will appear, the emphasis is rather different from his.

Some time ago a Hungarian post-graduate, Dr. P. Erdös, studying under Prof. L. J Mordell at Manchester University, enunciated an interesting theorem connected with a triangle, for which he asked that a proof should be given.

Suppose C is a convex curve bounding a plane domain of area A. l will denote the length of C and d its diameter ; that is, the upper bound of the distance between any pair of its points. It is clear that, for all convex curves C, 2d≤l≤πd. In this paper I consider classes of convex curves C with a given value of l satisfying one or more further conditions. The aim will be in each case to find the curves which enclose minimum or maximum area. The existence of a curve of a given class ∑ for which the area enclosed attains the maximum or minimum possible follows from compactness in the class of convex curves in a bounded part of the plane.

The theory of duality is well known as a useful tool in the study of convex three-dimensional polyhedra. For example, if we know the types of polyhedra that can be circumscribed about a sphere, duality provides an immediate answer to the question as to what types can be inscribed in a sphere. Theorems like Euler’s Theorem (V – E + F = 2 where V, E and F are the numbers of vertices, edges and faces of a convex polyhedron) are self-dual in the sense that duality simply interchanges the values of V and F.

A frieze pattern is an array of numbers arranged in staggered rows, like the bricks in a wall. In the case of a multiplicative frieze pattern the top and bottom rows consist entirely of ones, and for each ‘diamond’ of four elements

the unimodular rule

ad = bc + 1 (2)

holds. These frieze patterns have many curious properties, and for further details the reader is referred to the article Triangulated polygons and frieze patterns by J. H. Conway and H. S. M. Coxeter which appeared in Gazette 57, 87–94 and 175–183 (1973).