How To Calculate Wavelength

Hi, my name is Charles and I am one of the Maths teachers from the Maxim Workshop. I am just telling you now how to teach some articles in maths. I am going to show you how to calculate the 'wavelength'.

So if you think about oscillations, normally they would have a wavelength and a speed associated with them and a frequency. Now the general equation for wavelength, speed and frequency looks like this. It got 'c' as the 'speed, it got 'frequency' as 'f', and you have ambda, which is a Greek symbol as the wavelength.

Now the 'speed' is normally measured in meter per second, and frequency in Hertz, and wavelength in meters or centimeters, depending on what your units of speed would be. So imagine, if we have certain oscillation that moves with a certain speed that might be the speed of a wave, which has an oscillation, say, a water wave in a swimming pool. We see that the speed of this wave moves out 2 meters per second.

Okay? And we know that the frequency of this wave moves out 10 Hertz. Now, the symbol for Hertz is 'Hz'. Now we would want to calculate the wavelength.

So going back to our original equation we can see. So if we want to calculate λ, which is our wavelength, we need to rearrange this equation, to obtain the wavelength as the subject. So you can see f, which is the frequency, is multiplied by λ here.

If we want to take 'f' to the other side of the equal sign, we know it has to perform the opposite operation of multiplication, and that is division. So we got 'c' divided by 'f' equals 'λ', and that is the basic rearrangement. So now we got 'λ' equating to 2, divided by frequency which is 10.

Now if you look at your simple fraction here, you got 2 divided by 10, now that is going to give you, when you cancel the top and bottom with 2s in both, this has a factor 2 and this has a factor 2, so you get 1 divided by 5 and that is going to give you meters, and so it is pretty much good as 0.2 meters, because 1 divided by 5 is the same as you do in 100 divided by 5, so when you think about how to convert this fraction into this decimal, always think about your number as larger, as it is more easy to be working with, so if you divide 100 by 5, you would get 20, so if you divide 1 by 5, it should give you 0.2, Okay? And this would be the wavelength of your wave within your swimming pool, and that is generally how to calculate the wavelength of an oscillation. .