Month: April 2019

Frequently Questioned Answers: Uncountable Infinities

We could continue forever discussing questions whose answers are frequently questioned; but let’s finish by looking at infinity itself. The concept is impossible to fully grasp, because we are finite, and all of our experience is finite. Mathematicians have worked out ways to deal with infinity, though, and the results are often counter-intuitive. That means …

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More on 0.999…

(An archive question of the week) In collecting questions and answers about 0.999… for the last post, there were two that were too long to include, but that dig more deeply into issues that some of the standard answers tend to gloss over. So here, I want to look at those two answers, both of …

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Frequently Questioned Answers: 0.999… = 1

Having looked at two common questions in probability that are often challenged, let’s turn to the realm of numbers. Non-terminating decimals are inherently problematic, and one particular example causes difficulty for many, even after they fully accept the mathematics of it. Our FAQ page on this topic, at 0.9999… = 1, is very brief, and …

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Area of a Plot of Land

The last four posts dealt with formulas for finding areas using lengths of sides, starting with the triangle, where that is all you need, and then quadrilaterals, where something more must be added; and then using coordinates of vertices. Now we can use those tools to solve some of the more common real-life problems we …

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Polygon Coordinates and Areas

We’ve been collecting techniques for finding areas of polygons, mostly using their side lengths. We started with triangles (Heron’s formula), then quadrilaterals (Bretschneider’s formula and Brahmagupta’s formula), and the fact that the largest possible area is attained when the vertices lie on a circle. We’ll look at one more way to find area, using coordinates …

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