Ten strategies to improve studies skills

Theory of set
5 mathematicians
1.
Create an appropriate study environment. You will need limited noise, a lot of sunlight, a tidy
surface, and comfortable furniture. Find a quiet place to study where you won't be bothered.
This is very important and should be given great care in doing.
2. Get everything you need before you sit down to study. Pencils, pens, notebooks, college
ruled paper, textbooks, etc
Avoid distractions. If you have family members that distract you, politely ask them to leave so
you can continue with your assignments. If you have kids, this might not be possible. Make sure
the TV and radio are off. If you need background noise, classical music might be of interest.
Take notes in any classes that you have. You can even take notes at work. It may be easier to
use abbreviations for common words, only record important information (and/or key words), use
clear headers to organize information and use pictures/diagrams to demonstrate. Highlight or
underline key points in your material
Develop a study group. This way you can quiz each other and learn things from each other.
Take frequent breaks. Go for a walk, ride your bike, or be with family. When you take frequent
breaks, you find that you aren't boggled with the stress of homework and you can't wait to get
back to your assignments later
Develop effective memorization techniques - You can use lists when having to memorize
several things eg. (formulae). Flash cards are good for memorizing large amounts of grouped
information.
Develop critical reading skills. As students move into higher grades, they're assigned larger
and more complex reading assignments. Poor reading skills or an inability to read for important
information will make these assignments a burden and undermine overall academic success.
Students need to deliberately learn to read for key information. If reading skills are weak, it's
important for the student to seek help improving them; otherwise performance in many subjects
would be impacted

Focus on the areas that require the most attention. Study things more if you have a hard
time doing them
Improve test-taking strategies. A poor test result doesn't always mean that the student doesn't
have a good grasp of the academic material or skill gaps. It's possible that the student
understands the material, but doesn't take tests well. An effective test-taking strategy includes:
learning how to prioritize material when studying for a test; preparing for a test over a number of
days and not just the night before; coping with stress during the test; and managing time during
a test so that all sections or areas are completed.
Ask yourself questions. Asking questions should lead to emphasis on the what, why, how,
when, who and where of study content. Ask yourself questions while you read or study.
Answering them will help to make sense of the material, and aid you in remembering it, because
the process will make an impression on you. Those things that make impressions are more
meaningful, and therefore more easily remembered.
Get help. When you don't know what to do when you have to study for something. Don't give
upgo and talk to someone about it; don't just keep it to yourself.

Stretching during your breaks might help give your body and/or mind a boost of
energy.

The easiest things to learn are things that you are interested in. Become
interested in the things that you struggle most with.

Repeated reading improves your retention power.

Remember to close your door so that you don't get distracted by noise anywhere
else in the area.

Take studying seriously, but remember to take frequent breaks especially if you
get stressed. For each one hour of studying, take approximately 5-10 minutes break.

Eat an hour before you sit down to study. Your brain cannot work effectively while
you are hungry.

Get out the notes you need. It will be nice to write the notes, but reading,
reflecting, or building on the notes really helps when you need it most.

Do your homework before extra curricular activities.

When in your room, do not lay down and study. You may find yourself dozing off
and not getting any work done.
set theory, branch of mathematics that deals with the properties of well-defined collections of
objects, which may or may not be of a mathematical nature, such as numbers or functions. The
theory is less valuable in direct application to ordinary experience than as a basis for precise
and adaptable terminology for the definitionof complex and sophisticated mathematical
concepts

Between the years 1874 and 1897, the German mathematician and logician Georg
Cantor created a theory of abstract sets of entities and made it into a mathematical
discipline. This theory grew out of his investigations of some concrete problems
regarding certain types of infinite sets of real numbers. A set, wrote Cantor, is a
collection of definite, distinguishable objects of perception or thought conceived as a
whole. The objects are called elements or members of the set.
The theory had the revolutionary aspect of treating infinite sets as mathematical objects
that are on an equal footing with those that can be constructed in a finitenumber of
steps. Since antiquity, a majority of mathematicians had carefully avoided the
introduction into their arguments of the actual infinite (i.e., of sets containing
an infinity of objects conceived as existing simultaneously, at least in thought). Since
this attitude persisted until almost the end of the 19th century, Cantors work was the
subject of much criticism to the effect that it dealt with fictionsindeed, that it
encroached on the domain of philosophers and violated the principles of religion. Once
applications to analysis began to be found, however, attitudes began to change, and by
the 1890s Cantors ideas and results were gaining acceptance. By 1900, set theory was
recognized as a distinct branch of mathematics.
At just that time, however, several contradictions in so-called naive set theory were
discovered. In order to eliminate such problems, an axiomatic basis was developed for
the theory of sets analogous to that developed for elementary geometry. The degree of
success that has been achieved in this development, as well as the present stature of
set theory, has been well expressed in the Nicolas Bourbakilments de
mathmatique (begun 1939; Elements of Mathematics): Nowadays it is known to be

possible, logically speaking, to derive practically the whole of known mathematics from
a single source, The Theory of Sets.

Fundamental set concepts

In naive set theory, a set is a collection of objects (called members or elements) that is
regarded as being a single object. To indicate that an object x is a member of a
set A one writes x A, while x A indicates that x is not a member of A. A set may be
defined by a membership rule (formula) or by listing its members within braces. For
example, the set given by the rule prime numbers less than 10 can also be given by
{2, 3, 5, 7}. In principle, any finite set can be defined by an explicit list of its members,
but specifying infinite sets requires a rule or pattern to indicate membership; for
example, the ellipsis in {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, } indicates that the list of natural
numbers N goes on forever. The empty (or void, or null) set, symbolized by {} or ,
contains no elements at all. Nonetheless, it has the status of being a set.
A set A is called a subset of a set B (symbolized by A B) if all the members of Aare
also members of B. For example, any set is a subset of itself, and is a subset of any
set. If both A B and B A, then A and B have exactly the same members. Part of the
set concept is that in this case A = B; that is, A and B are the same set.

Set theory is the mathematical theory of well-determined collections,

called sets, of objects that are called members, or elements, of the set.
Pure set theory deals exclusively with sets, so the only sets under
consideration are those whose members are also sets. The theory of
thehereditarily-finite sets, namely those finite sets whose elements are
also finite sets, the elements of which are also finite, and so on, is
formally equivalent to arithmetic. So, the essence of set theory is the
study of infinite sets, and therefore it can be defined as the
mathematical theory of the actualas opposed to potentialinfinite.

5 mathematicians

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

We start our list with Sir Isaac Newton, considered by many to be the greatest scientist of all time.
There aren't many subjects that Newton didn't have a huge impact in he was one of the inventors
of calculus, built the first reflecting telescope and helped establish the field of classical mechanics
with his seminal work, "Philosophi Naturalis Principia Mathematica." He was the first to decompose
white light into its component colors and gave us the three laws of motion, now known as Newton's
laws. (You might remember the first one from school: "Objects at rest tend to stay at rest and objects
in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by an external force.")
We would live in a very different world had Sir Isaac Newton not been born. Other scientists would
probably have worked out most of his ideas eventually, but there is no telling how long it would have
taken and how far behind we might have fallen from our current technological trajectory.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Carl Gauss (1777 - 1855)

Isaac Newton is a hard act to follow, but if anyone can pull it off, it's Carl Gauss. If Newton is
considered the greatest scientist of all time, Gauss could easily be called the greatest mathematician
ever. Carl Friedrich Gauss was born to a poor family in Germany in 1777 and quickly showed himself
to be a brilliant mathematician. He published "Arithmetical Investigations," a foundational textbook
that laid out the tenets of number theory (the study of whole numbers). Without number theory, you
could kiss computers goodbye. Computers operate, on a the most basic level, using just two digits
1 and 0, and many of the advancements that we've made in using computers to solve problems
are solved using number theory. Gauss was prolific, and his work on number theory was just a small
part of his contribution to math; you can find his influence throughout algebra, statistics, geometry,
optics, astronomy and many other subjects that underlie our modern world.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

John von Neumann (1903-1957)

John von Neumann was born in Budapest a few years after the start of the 20th century, a well-timed
birth for all of us, for he went on to design the architecture underlying nearly every single computer
built on the planet today. Right now, whatever device or computer that you are reading this on, be it
phone or computer, is cycling through a series of basic steps billions of times over each second;
steps that allow it to do things like render Internet articles and play videos and music, steps that
were first thought up by John von Neumann.
Von Neumann received his Ph.D in mathematics at the age of 22 while also earning a degree in
chemical engineering to appease his father, who was keen on his son having a good marketable
skill. Thankfully for all of us, he stuck with math. In 1930, he went to work at Princeton University with
Albert Einstein at the Institute of Advanced Study. Before his death in 1957, von Neumann made
important discoveries in set theory, geometry, quantum mechanics, game theory, statistics, computer
science and was a vital member of the Manhattan Project.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Alan Turing (1912 - 1954)

Alan Turing a British mathematician who has been call the father of computer science. During World
War II, Turing bent his brain to the problem of breaking Nazi crypto-code and was the one to finally
unravel messages protected by the infamous Enigma machine. Being able to break Nazi codes gave
the Allies an enormous advantage and was latercredited by Winston Churchill as one of the main
reasons the Allies won the war.
Besides helping to stop Nazi Germany from achieving world domination, Alan Turing was
instrumental in the development of the modern day computer. His design for a so-called "Turing
machine" remains central to how computers operate today. The "Turing test" is an exercise in
artificial intelligence that tests how well an AI program operates; a program passes the Turing test if
it can have a text chat conversation with a human and fool that person into thinking that it too is a
person.

Alan Turing's career and life ended tragically when he was arrested and prosecuted for being gay.
He was found guilty and sentenced to undergo hormone treatment to reduce his libido, losing his
security clearance as well. On June, 8, 1954, Alan Turing was found dead of apparent suicide by his
cleaning lady.
Turing's contributions to computer science can be summed up by the fact that his name now adorns
the field's top award. The Turing Award is to computer science what the Nobel Prize is to chemistry
or the Fields Medal is to mathematics. In 2009, then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized
for how his government treated Turing, but stopped short of issuing an official pardon.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-2010)

Benoit Mandelbrot landed on this list thanks to his discovery of fractal geometry. Fractals, oftenfantastical and complex shapes built on simple, self-replicable formulas, are fundamental to
computer graphics and animation. Without fractals, it's safe to say that we would be decades behind
where we are now in the field of computer-generated images. Fractal formulas are also used to
design cellphone antennas and computer chips, which takes advantage of the fractal's natural ability
to minimize wasted space.
Mandelbrot was born in Poland in 1924 and had to flee to France with his family in 1936 to avoid
Nazi persecution. After studying in Paris, he moved to the U.S. where he found a home as an IBM
Fellow. Working at IBM meant that he had access to cutting-edge technology, which allowed him to
apply the number-crunching abilities of electrical computer to his projects and problems. In 1979,
Mandelbrot discovered a set of numbers, now called the described by science-fiction writer Arthur C.
Clarke as Mandelbrot set, that were "one of the most beautiful and astonishing discoveries in the
entire history of mathematics." (To learn more about the technical steps behind drawing the
Mandelbrot set, click over to the infographic I made last year for a class that I'm taking.)
Benoit Mandelbrot died of pancreatic cancer in 2010.

Read more: http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/5-brilliant-mathematiciansand-their-impact-on-the-modern#ixzz3in9UmWEj