Preface

After a long time, I have decided to resurrect the mathematics part of this blog! I started Diversions in Mathematics as a way for me to try to explain mathematics to the general public. This continues to be the main goal of this series of blogposts — for a more detailed introduction, please read the introductory remarks. I wrote two posts in this series, but then abruptly stopped. Part of the reason was that my studies got in the way, but I was also unsure exactly what material to present, and how to present it. I wrote down some of my thoughts on this matter in a previous update post.

One of the main issues as a writer is to consider the readers’ background in mathematics. For posts targeting the general public (like the previous two Diversions), I have tried to assume as little as possible while maintaining the discussion at an intelligent level, i.e. without “dumbing down” anything) However, this already assumes familiarity with many mathematical concepts taught in high school, or at least, some level of maturity in regard to abstract reasoning. Consequently I have decided to relaunch Diversions in Mathematics with high school mathematics as a foundation.

In this blogpost, I will introduce the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, one of the most fundamental results in mathematical analysis, with the aim of connecting various topics that are typically studied in the Year 12 HSC maths curriculum in NSW. The main article is below.

Continue reading “Diversions in Mathematics 3a: The Cauchy-Schwarz inequality (part 1)” →