A recent question reminded me that we hadn’t yet covered the topic of radians. We’ll look at several questions comparing radians to degrees, concluding with the recent question: Is a radian a unit, or something else?
Having looked at what it takes to work out an indefinite integral, using all our tools, we need to face something that isn’t explained often enough: Some integrals aren’t just difficult; they’re impossible! We’ll look at what we’ve said in several cases where this issue arose.
Individual techniques of integration, as discussed in the last two posts, don’t represent the reality of the process, any more than demonstrating how to use a hammer or a screwdriver shows how to do carpentry. Let’s look at two questions we’ve had about challenging integrals that require a combination of methods. We’ll be using substitution, …
Having looked at two basic techniques of integration, let’s start putting things together. How do you approach an integral without knowing what method to use? We’ll focus on substitution here, which is also called “change of variables”.
Having looked at some issues in integration, let’s look at some old questions about integration by parts.
A couple recent questions offered tricks for integrating rational functions, opportunistically modifying or working around the usual method of partial fractions. We have previously discussed this method in Partial Fractions: How and Why, and in Integration: Partial Fractions and Substitution, where we looked at other variations.
A recent question reminded me I hadn’t yet written about the complexity surrounding the definition of ratio (and related terms, like rate and fraction). Here are four questions about the words.
Last time we looked at how to find the length of material on a roll, making some necessary simplifications. Here, I want to look at some variations on that: first, about carpet in particular, and then about wire on a spool.
One of the more frequent questions we had on Ask Dr. Math was about how to find the length of material (carpet, paper, wire, etc.) on a roll, knowing only the inner and outer diameters and something else: the thickness of the material, or the number of turns, or the original size of the roll. …
Last time we looked at the meaning of the concept of locus. This time, we’ll explore seven examples, from two students. We’ll look at both algebraic (equation) and geometric (description) perspectives.