Algebra Homework
Clare Briggs
Clare Briggs is a famous cartoonist who lived from 1875 to 1930. Poems by Wilbur Nesbitt.
Recent Comments
on What To Expect When You’re Expecting a Trade WarThis is a place where smart people belong in figuring this out I've met one or two smart people before. They w…
on What To Expect When You’re Expecting a Trade WarEh, I’m not a fan of tariffs at all. If the other guy is shooting himself in the foot, why join him? Tariffs s…on Open Mic for the Week of 4/7/2025JayBird: the dance where someone asks for evidence and then, when it’s provided, they say “that’s not conclusi…
on Saturday Morning Gaming: MetroidvaniasThat sounds about right from what I've seen of Hollow Knight (I think I beat the first boss and got slightly i…
- on What To Expect When You’re Expecting a Trade WarAnd, let’s face it, if I wanted to argue for tariffs at all, easy mode would be “reciprocal tariffs against fe…
- on Open Mic for the Week of 4/7/2025You...think he's lying about the people he directly quoted and usually linked to the quotes of int he article?
ICYMI
How Should Democrats Handle Student Loan Payments90 Comments
Ordinary Times’ Andrew Donaldson on The Young Turks “Indisputable” with Dr. Rashad Richey2 Comments
Thursday Throughput: The Boys Are All Right Fertility Edition100 Comments
Linky Friday: ‘Cause Ain’t No Such Things As Halfway Crooks Edition34 Comments
The Politics of Survival: Putting Yourself in a Box223 Comments
The Lost Art of Book Learning10 Comments
On Writing of Wrongs40 Comments
Game of Thrones: Little People, Big World60 Comments
Oh, and I was hoping for an example of a problem.
“See? This is the math we *USED* to teach!”
There’s a page from a math book from the 1920s here. Impenetrable at first glance but, nope, you can do these in your head.
Even if it’s been decades.Report
oh, wait
maybe you can only do #14 in your headReport
Most of the problems are amenable to a change of variable and the quadratic formula. Then once you realize that most of the answers are going to be small integers, or at least based on small integers, you can solve a number of them in your head by just trying small integers to see which work.Report
While I can sing the Quadratic to the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel”, I can’t do it in my head anymore.
Sigh.Report
No, but for the first problem, you can run through small integers in your head and find that 1 and 4 work (so also -1 and -4). For the second, 2 and 3 work (also -2 and -3). For number eight, you chunk through the numbers that have integral fourth roots (1, 16, 81, 196, etc) to find that 196 works.
I always told my calculus students that if they were working one of my test problems and the algebra suddenly became unmanageable, they should back up because they had made a mistake. I wasn’t testing whether they could do overly complicated algebraic manipulation.Report
I don’t think you need the quadratic formula for any of these. There are enough moving parts that you’d probably want scratch paper, but these all seem fairly easily factorable.Report