Mathematics

A question for all you math experts out there – is division by zero possible? On the face of it, the simple answer would seem to be no. Here’s an example: “If you have three apples and no students, how…
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Dice are an often used synecdoche for explaining statistics. Rolling multiple dice is tantamount to calculating the probability of two independent events occurring together. To state it generally, the probability of two events occurring together is equal to the product…
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There are many ways to describe change. Depending on what aspect that is to be described will depend on the individual. Specifically, mathematics describes the process and the quantity of change. Mathematics is a broad spectrum of tools to quantify…
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“Implicit differentiation” refers to differentiation of an implicitly defined function. Ordinarily the definition of a function is explicit: the name of the function appears on one side of an equals sign and the operations on the independent variables that define…
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Anyone experienced in helping students in any on-line mathematic and homework help forum are destined to see questions like “why should we learn this?” and “are we going to use this in real world?” asked several times by different students….
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Division by zero is not impossible in mathematics. The evidence for why it is not impossible, lies in the fact that the result such division could still be represented by a mathematic symbols. Depending on what number the division was…
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I’ll let you know up front that I’m not a mathematician. When I was in school I probably generated a half ton or more of eraser shavings from redoing botched math problems and there was more than one occasion where…
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These are three of the most common statistical graphics; in fact, they are ubiquitous. Each is used for a different purpose. The most common use of a bar graph is to show the relationship between a categorical variable and a…
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Note: This is an introduction, and I deliberately avoid getting into technical details. Entire books have been written about the details, and, if you use statistics, you will likely have your own sources. Statistical significance is used widely – in…
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Sudoku is a great puzzle, but it is not about mathematics at all. To see this, note that you could substitute the letters A through I for the numbers 1 through 9, and you will have the same puzzle. The…
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