Day: October 1, 2008

After a couple of months in beta mode urbrainy.com has fully launched today. Aimed at parents of children in their early years it provides a whole host of colourful maths worksheets. Plenty are free but if you want the full 1000 + then there is a subscription of £10.00 for a year – pretty good value, I think, and the site is nice and bright.

They have let me publish some of these maths worksheets recently and I will hope to do so again in the future. Here is a typical sample of four pages about ordering numbers.

Order 3 small numbers

If you are interested in how mathematics has come about and all the wonderful developments in science that have come from maths, then this is the series for you.

Starting on Monday 6th October at 9.00pm on BBC 4 it takes a journey through the past and around the world, to Egypt, China, India, Russia, The Middle East and more.

It shows how maths was crucial to the success of all the great civilisations. After all, without maths there would be no time keeping, no money, no cars, no planes, no electricity and indeed you would not be able to read this on a computer screen.

It brings us right up to today, with examples such as prime numbers, knowledge of which until recently was of little practical use, but now nearly all our security pin numbers etc are based on prime numbers.

Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford leads us on our journey and there are a number of supporting interactive games etc at Open2.net to go with the series.