Geometry, calculus and in particular integrals, are too often seen by young students as technical tools with no link to the reality. This fact generates a loss of interest in students with a consequent removal of motivation in the study of such topics and more widely in pursuing scientific curricula. With this note we put to the fore a simple…

By introducing the mathematical concept of orientation, the significance of the minus sign in Faraday's law may be made clear to students with some knowledge of vector calculus. For many students, however, the traditional approach of treating the law as a relationship between positive scalars and of relying on Lenz's law to provide the information…

Describes a simple experiment that uses a CCD video camera, a display monitor, and a laser-printed bar pattern to illustrate signal sampling problems that produce aliasing or moiri fringes in images. Uses the Fourier transform to provide an appropriate and elegant means to explain the sampling theorem and the aliasing phenomenon in CCD-based…