Month: May 2019

Why Do We Need Proofs?

One aspect of mathematics that students often struggle with, particularly in geometry (which traditionally has been where proof is introduced), is writing proofs. Why do we need to learn about proofs? Why are proofs needed in the first place? Here are a few answers we’ve given to these questions.

More on Uncountable Irrationals

(An archive question of the week) While I was researching for the post on uncountable sets, I ran across a discussion that didn’t quite fit, but raises interesting questions about how countable and uncountable sets can fit together. How can the rational numbers be countable, but the irrational numbers, which are closely intertwined with them, …

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More Than 100 Percent?

One of the questions we looked at in our recent survey of percent change problems involved percentages over 100%, which often confuse students. How can anything be more than 100%? Let’s look at a couple questions about that issue.

Percent Change: Markup and Margin

We have looked at how to calculate, apply, and undo a percent increase or decrease. Here we will look at some special terms used in business for percent increases, which have been a source of many questions over the years.