The other day a student I was helping face to face asked how she can know when to check for extraneous solutions of an equation. I gave her a quick version of my standard answer, and the light went on! Today I want to share these thoughts here, because they are very important in several …
(New Question of the Week) Occasionally we get questions challenging the correctness of a textbook problem, or of a test grade. And sometimes we get questions about mathematics used in sciences like physics or chemistry, which lead us to explore unfamiliar fields. The most interesting question this week is one of these. It is one …
(Archive Question of the Week) Recently I discussed the definition of the median of a data set, pointing out how it needs refinements that are not often discussed. In searching for questions in our archive on that topic, I ran across a discussion of an opposite issue: the breadth of the general term “average”, which …
We frequently get questions about how to round; so many different issues arise that I won’t try to fit them all into one post. Children have trouble learning how to do it, and sometimes their parents are surprised to find that they are being taught a different way than they learned. There are several common …
(New Question of the Week) One of the benefits of being a Math Doctor is interacting with the math of many cultures around the world, as we attract an international following. We have observed variations in terminology and notation from country to country, as well as variations in the content of math education (some better …
(Archive question of the week) Sometimes, we get a question that seems familiar, and can look back at past questions to see if we have already answered it, or to get ideas about what it means. This is the story of a problem that seems to float around as folklore, in varied forms. At first …
From time to time, a student will write to us asking for advice on studying, rather than on math itself. As either successful students, or teachers, or (quite often) as adults who recall overcoming difficulties in the past, we have some good advice to offer. Today, I want to look at three answers, by three …
(New question of the week) Here is a recent question from Fida, another long-time “patient” of ours at Ask Dr. Math:
(Archive question of the week) For Wednesdays, I plan to find a single interesting question from the past and discuss it. One of the things I’ve enjoyed about Ask Dr. Math is getting questions I’d never have thought of on my own, but which lead to some fascinating ideas. Here is an old favorite from …
From time to time we get questions about finding the median in statistics. Some are entirely routine; but the three I want to discuss today take us gradually deeper into a morass of ambiguity. A recurring theme of my experience in Ask Dr. Math has been that definitions are not always what they seem – …