(An archive question of the week) Recently we looked at the question of how likely a two-child family with a boy is to have another boy (or, to the contrary, to also have a girl). Searching for those questions turned up another one of interest involving the gender of a pair of siblings: How do …
(An archive question of the week) In collecting questions and answers about 0.999… for the last post, there were two that were too long to include, but that dig more deeply into issues that some of the standard answers tend to gloss over. So here, I want to look at those two answers, both of …
(An archive question of the week) Usually when we discuss converses (and inverses and contrapositives) we use clear, idealized examples. But statements in real life — even in real math — are not quite so straightforward. The difficulty is not merely in the language, but in the complexity of our statements. A question in the …
(An archive question of the week) We’ve looked at the basic transformations of a function and how they affect its graph, then at how they combine, and then how they can interact with specific functions. Now let’s look at one problem from beginning to end, looking at a graph and finding the function that goes …
(An archive question of the week) Last time we looked at a formula for approximating the mode of grouped data, which works well for normal distributions, though I have never seen an actual proof, or a statement of conditions under which it is appropriate. We have also received questions about a much more well-known, and …
Last time we looked at various ways to find tangent lines to a parabola without using calculus. Another standard calculus task is to find the maximum or minimum of a function; this is commonly done in the case of a parabola (quadratic function) using algebra, but can it be done with a cubic function? Yes, …
(An archive question of the week) The indeterminate nature of 0/0, which we looked at last time, is an essential part of the derivative (in calculus): every derivative that exists is a limit of that form! So it is a good idea to think about how these ideas relate. Here is a question from 2007: …
(An archive question of the week) While gathering combinatorics questions, there were several that stood out. This one will serve well to summarize the topic, showing multiple methods for counting, and contrasting other kinds of problems. The problem The question, from 2007, relates to an Arby’s promotion: How Many Different Dinners Can Be Ordered? I …
(An archive question of the week) Last time we looked at some elementary problems in combinatorics, where we counted the number of ways to choose or arrange elements of a set. Let’s look at a somewhat more complicated problem, which will demonstrate issues that come up in interpreting such a problem and in choosing a …
Six Distinguishable People in Four Distinguishable Rooms Read More »
(An archive problem of the week) While gathering sequence/pattern questions for my last post, I ran across a very different problem. Here we are told what the pattern is (a good example of one that you would probably never discover on your own), and asked some questions about later terms. It can be understood either …