Month: February 2025

Slides, Turns, and Flips: How to Combine Them

Last time we looked at what it means to translate, rotate, and reflect figures on a plane. Here, we’ll look at some questions about what happens when these three transformations (and a fourth, the glide reflection) are combined.

What If: Inventing “Pseudo-Complex” Numbers

We’ll work through a textbook exercise that encourages students to discover what it’s like to invent a new number system, as well as why some ideas work but others do not. The topic: What would happen if we changed the definition of the imaginary unit i so that its square is 1 rather than -1?

A System of Exponential Equations

What do you do when you are given a problem that starts with a “lie” and ends with a wrong answer? We’ll go in several directions with this problem, a system of two exponential equations in two variables.