Month: February 2020

Volume and Surface Area of a Sphere – Without Calculus

We often get questions about deriving formulas for area and volume; usually when the question is about a sphere, the context is calculus, so we talk about integration, the usual modern method. But for students who only know geometry, “wait until you learn calculus” can be unsatisfying. Fortunately, there are a couple ways to do …

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Supply, Demand, and Proportion

(A new question of the week) Since we looked at a question about economics last week, let’s examine another, which is very different, relating the supply and demand curves to the concept of variation or proportion. We are not economists, so we can’t go deeply into that subject, but it makes us think about some …

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Summing Divisors

In searching for answers about counting divisors over the last couple weeks, I found a few that are about the similar question of finding the sum of a number’s divisors. In fact, a couple questions and answers confuse the two problems. Let’s finish off the topic by looking at these. (Keep in mind that “divisor” …

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