Month: November 2020

One Mode, No Modes, Many Modes

I’ll close this series on averages with a quick look at the mode. Unlike the other “averages”, this doesn’t always exist, and when it is, it is not always unique. In fact, as we’ll see, sometimes we can’t be sure whether there is no mode, or many modes. How do we handle these odd cases?

Infinitely Truncating a Triangle

(A new question of the week) Here is an intriguing question we got at the end of September from an adult whose name I’ll shorten to Arun.

A Mind-Stretching Exercise with a Stretched Cosine

(A new question of the week) A question in September, about graphing a horizontally-stretched cosine function, led to a long conversation. Between a typo in the problem and some inside-out thinking, this surprisingly non-routine problem led to some good mind-stretching! I have edited this down considerably by removing distractions from the main ideas, but it …

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