I introduced Newton's Method to Amber tonight, since she's been very interested in the square root of two recently, and Newton's Method is a pretty good way to approximate it.  Also, I thought she might be ready for the process ( Read more... )

Introductory Calculus For Infants, by Omi M. Inouye ( Read more... )

I was doing something related to Fermat primes, and noticed that my TI-84's interpretation of 2^2^5+1 isn't 4294967297 as I'd expect (famously divisible by 641), but rather 1025: It's interpreting it as ((2^2)^5)+1. How'd they get the order of operations wrong there?

I was just working with a student, and they had a probability problem where:

P(A or B) = 1/2, but P(B) = 3/4

This really isn't a context where P(A and not B) is allowed to be -1/4.

Logicomix, by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou, art by Alecos Papdatos and Annie Di Donna ( Read more... )

I was recently helping a student with the rational-guesses trick to find the roots of a polynomial (ax^n ... b = 0 only has rational roots of the form +/- [factor of b]/[factor of a]).

She wound up asking what to do when none of the roots were real: Just try the same numbers with iThe answer, obvious in retrospect, is that instead of factoring ( Read more... )

Statistics in Action: Understanding a World of Data, by Ann E. Watkins, Richard L. Scheaffer and George W. Cobb ( Read more... )

Beth: "I'm not afraid of partial differential equations."

Beth, completing the thought: "Especially if you're doing them."

The amended version is significantly less reassuring in the event that I get stuck on a math problem.

To be fair, Beth is perfectly capable of solving that kind of problem, but I've been practicing more math recently.

The Bible Repairman, by Tim Powers ( Read more... )

As I was falling asleep last night, it occurred to me that polynomials are isomorphic to articles of clothing.

In the morning, of course, this makes no sense whatsoever.