PTC Community Spotlight: Tetsuro Tokoro (ttokoro)

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Professor Tetsuro Tokoro (ttokoro on the PTC Community) is a member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan (IEEJ), and he has dedicated much of his time to teaching and studying electric circuit design for his college students at Japan’s National Institute of Technology (KOSEN), Gifu College.

A true man of math, ttokoro finds helping community members solve their problems to be very fun. He seeks out math-based brain teasers and shares them with the Mathcad community to gain the insights of his kind and very intelligent fellow Mathcad users. These include resistor meshes (including in 3D), perfect squared squares, and a puzzle where you must identify the minimum radius on a circle with n number of points where all distances between points must be an integer. Sometimes, he looks for problems on rosettacode.org to solve.

According to ttokoro, many of these problems are unique and won’t be found in a textbook (and many math textbooks in use were written before math software came to the scene) but demonstrate the value of math software. Ttokoro ventures to say that a lot of these problems cannot be solved by hand, or at least it would be unviable to do so, especially for students. Instead, Mathcad and its programming operators must be used to solve these problems.

Montage of resistor meshes and other fun problems ttokoro has introduced

Beginning in 2021, ttokoro has also become a prolific uploader of Japanese PTC Mathcad content on YouTube. Many of these videos share tips or are tie-ins to the puzzles he or others post on the PTC Community, including the Mathcad Community Challenges.

Ttokoro’s best resistor 3D mesh electric circuit. (Each edge is made by one ohm. Find the resistance between Node [0,0,0] and [1,1,2].)

Ttokoro first started using Mathcad with Mathcad 12, and his biggest requests for Mathcad Prime features are transparent colour availability and for the Animation tool to return. You’ll notice that in his brain teasers, as well as in his submissions to the Mathcad Community Challenges, ttokoro likes to show results with plots because it helps convey the meaning better than with math results alone and having more tools to show the results via images helps with that. This sort of thinking carries over to his academic work as well.

Ttokoro wearing his PTC Champion Jacket and PTC Mathcad T- shirt!

Thank you for your enthusiasm for math and contributions to the PTC Community, ttokoro!