Month: January 2020

The Locker Problem

A classic problem we’ve seen hundreds of times involves students opening and closing lockers. I have often told people that, believe it or not, they could find the answer by searching the Ask Dr. Math site for the word “locker”. But I prefer to give them a reference to one of the answers in which …

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Counting Divisors of a Number

How many divisors (also called factors) does a number have? We’ve answered many questions about that over the years, sometimes by just guiding a student to discover it, sometimes either deriving the formula for them or just showing and using it. Let’s look at a few.

Domain, Range, and Quadratic Inequalities

(A new question of the week) We had a long discussion last August about domain and range of functions involving either quadratic functions or restricted domains (or both). Two Math Doctors got involved, offering different ways to approach the same problem. I’ve edited the discussion to avoid some intermingling of topics.

Leap Years: When and Why

Last week we looked at some questions that arose leading up to the year 2000, triggered by the 20th anniversary of that event. Now we’ll start from a different question about that year, to look at the story of leap years.