Have you ever wondered how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide using Roman numerals? On one hand, we’ll give the simple answer that the Romans didn’t actually do what you think; on the other hand, we’ll consider what they actually did.
Roman numerals are very different from the “Arabic” system we use; there is no “place value”. And yet, as we’ll see, the two systems have more in common than you might think.
Since we’ve been looking at an example of ambiguity in notation, let’s look at a very different one. There is a lot to be confused by in inverse trigonometry! We’ll try to untangle the notations of \(\sin^{-1}\) and \(\arcsin\).
(A new question of the week) Limits of indeterminate forms like ∞ – ∞ require us first to recognize the form, and then, often, use L’Hôpital’s rule (also called L’Hospital’s rule, as we’ll be seeing it here), or some other method. Today’s question will touch on all stages of this work for three examples, but …
Last time we looked into terminology related to negative numbers; one subtopic was too big to fit, so I’ve broken it out into a separate post. How are the concepts of “negative” and “minus” (subtraction) related? How much do we need to distinguish them? We’ll look at two questions, the first from a child focused …
(A new question of the week) A good way to develop a sense of what limits are and how they work comes from working with visual representations of them, in the form of graphs. In particular when the functions are defined by graphs rather than by equations, we have a lot more flexibility in creating …
We’ve looked at the meaning of the derivative, and of its various notations, including dy/dx. This leads to the next question: What does dx or dy mean on its own? This was touched on last time, but there’s a lot more to say that I couldn’t fit there. We’ll look at more advanced approaches to …
Last week we looked at the meaning of the derivative. In doing so, we mostly used the notation “”, but mentioned another in passing. Here I want to look at our answers to several questions about the different notations you will see.
I’ll finish this series on place value and writing numbers, with a question that’s not quite as simple as you might think: why we use commas and decimal points as we do. Americans may be surprised at some of the answers – and some of the questions.
Last time we looked at how to convert a number between decimal and word form. Now we’ll move into some tricky cases such as where to use “and” or a hyphen, to eliminate ambiguity.