Sunday Function
If you go to the bank and open a savings account, the banker might tell you about the virtues of compound interest. He may say something like “Even if you never deposit anything, the rate of change of...
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Death and taxes. And dead is dead, but taxes come in a huge panoply of forms. There’s property taxes, excise taxes, sin taxes and income taxes. There’s gas taxes and sales taxes and VAT taxes (yeah, I...
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Here’s a straightforward function of two variables, x and y: Its domain is all real x and y, with the single exception of x = y = 0, which would make the denominator 0. But we have experience with...
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Most textbooks, especially ones not aimed at college math majors, give a definition of “function” that seems quite intuitive. They’ll say something along the lines of: a function is a rule that takes...
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In pure mathematics there’s not too many function studied more than the Riemann zeta function. For reasons of historical tradition, the generic variable name that’s usually used is s instead of z. (The...
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This Christmas I got a little handheld GPS, which I’ve been using mostly for geocaching. As the device acquires signals from the various satellites dutifully orbiting overhead, it displays your...
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In my free time during data acquisition runs and the like, I’ve been paging through Hardy and Wright’s famous textbook An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers. It has something of a legendary...
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Here is a picture of the earth, with latitude and longitude lines in ten-degree increments: Despite the fact that each vaguely rectangular area formed by the intersection of those lines forms a 10...
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A while back I was driving in my car listening to the radio and was gobsmacked to hear a song (What’s My Name? by Rihanna and Drake) in which the singer’s rap involved accurately estimating a square...
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A reader asked me about the hyperbolic trig functions, sinh(x) and cosh(x). What are they for, and do they have an intuitive interpretation in physics? That’s a pretty good question. After all, most of...
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