A recent question, from Anindita, touched on the relationship of functions, relations, and rules. I referred to several answers we’ve given, which I’d long planned to put into a post (or two). This is it! We’ll start with a set of questions about what functions are.
Last week, we looked at problems involving some number of people making some number of things in some amount of time. In a classic twist on this problem, we’ll now examine several variants starting with “If a hen and a half can lay an egg and a half …”. Can we make sense of half-eggs …
A popular kind of word problem tells us how many people (or cats, or hens, …) it takes to make some number of houses (or kill some number of mice, or lay some number of eggs) in some amount of time, and then asks us to fill in one of the blanks for a different …
How Many A’s Can Make This Many B’s in This Much Time? Read More »