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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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Sunday Function

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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Sunday Function

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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Sunday Function

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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Sunday Function

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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Sunday Function

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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Sunday Function

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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Sunday Function

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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Sunday Function

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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Sunday Function

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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