It seems common for teachers to ask students which “measure of central tendency” (average) is best. Sometimes they ask this in a particular context (say, to report the “average” salary at a company); other times there is no context (other than perhaps some unidentified data). In the latter case, we generally consider the question to …
(New Question of the Week) From time to time we get a question that is more about words than about math; usually these are about the meaning or origin of mathematical terms. Fortunately, some of us love words as much as we love math. But the question I want to look at here, which came …
(Archive question of the week) One day back in November, as I entered the community college where I teach, a man came in behind me with his son, probably about 3 years old. It was the first snowy day of the year, and the father stood on the mat wiping his feet, while the little …
I now want to start looking more deeply at some specific questions at various levels, starting with arithmetic, then algebra and geometry. Students learning arithmetic (and their parents) tend to think in terms of following some rote procedure, just because “that’s the way it’s done”. Modern educators try to focus more on deep understanding, so …
In its more than 20 years, we answered hundreds of thousands of questions on Ask Dr. Math, only a small fraction of which were archived for public access. Those that did not make it into the archive were not bad answers, just not deemed to be of broad enough interest, or unique enough, to be …
A Sample of Ask Dr. Math, Part 1: Questions from School Read More »