Recent content by laplacean

A lot of universities have recorded lectures from past semesters up on their websites. If you want to follow along you could definitely learn a lot. I'm assuming it'd be pretty easy to find out what textbooks were used in the class. From there, you could just work through the class at your own...

http://www.math.uchicago.edu/~may/VIGRE/VIGRE2011/REUPapers/Jiang.pdf I always found it fascinating how number theory is used in code-breaking and cryptography. Worth the read.

As well as the power reducing formulas, you'll want to glance at the double angle formulas.

supercalifragislisticexpialidocious

I have an uncle that works in mechanical engineering as well! Welcome to PF!

It's very interesting to think about mathematics that humans would be unable to grasp. Especially considering with how abstract much of our current mathematics is. Makes you ponder what the human mind is truly capable of, and if there is an absolute threshold at some point. If we knew that we...

I'd go with two lines. I can't stand when people try to squeeze small, illegible numbers in between lines. Makes me cringe.

You can imagine the normal force as "pushing" the two surfaces (the wooden block and the floor) together. It is a rather easy conclusion to arrive to that if there is a lot of force pushing the two surfaces together, then it will be harder to slide one of the surfaces across the other.

It appears to be an inverse that cannot be found using conventional means. If you're up for it, you could try the Langrange inversion theorem.

That would be much appreciated (:

I did not get zero as an answer. A place where you could be making a computational mistake would be in the derivation of xcos(x/2).

The derivative of the top, when derived correctly, will yield a prime number. Just derive xcos(pi/x) as you would derive an x with a constant coefficient. For the bottom, pi^2 is also a constant and should go to 0 when derived. All you have left to deal with would be the -x^2.

Keep in mind, when taking the derivative, that cos(pi/2) is a constant.

Yes, you do need to incorporate the 1N. Vector addition is necessary in this problem, as both forces have components that contribute to the acceleration of the block. You cannot ignore the 1N.