Eastern Illinois University

Thursday, October 15, 2009

October 2nd Colloquium by Peter Andrews

Peter Andrews gave the colloquium talk on Friday October 2nd at 4 p.m.

The purpose of the talk was to introduce the faculty to a new package of free software called Geogebra which can be used for geometric demostrations.

An example of its use was given by showing that every conic section could be defined as the set of points equidistant from a fixed point and a moving point on a circle (including the circle at infinity, i.e. a straight line).

Professor Andrews also discussed Archimedes' measurement of the ellipse and parabola using Geogebra to demonstrate certain relations not easily obtained.

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