The Math Doctors

Last time, we looked at some non-recommended ways to factor a quadratic trinomial.

Recently in my college tutoring center, a student factored a quadratic polynomial using the X method, which I had heard of, but never watched being done for a hard example.

Last time, we considered what the normal distribution and the z-score mean; here, we’ll look at some more recent questions demonstrating how to use them.

Last time we looked at some questions about drawing or interpreting the normal curve (graph of the normal distribution).

We’ll look here at a recent question, and another from a year ago that it reminded me of.

Having looked at words for large numbers, let’s turn to the less-asked, but still interesting, question of where our words (in English) for ordinary little numbers come from.

Last time we looked at names of anniversaries (like “semiquincentennial” for the 250th), and other words based on Latin numbers (like “septuplets” for 7 babies).

This is the 250th anniversary of the United States, and as a result we’ve heard the term “semiquincentennial” a lot.

Recently, a teacher in Bangladesh asked us how to answer students’ common questions about his version of the proof that the square root of 2 is an irrational number.

Last time we looked at what hyperbolic functions are, as a parallel world to trigonometric (circular) functions.

Hyperbolic functions are functions that form a sort of parallel universe to the trigonometric functions.

A recent question asked about quadratic inequalities; we’ve touched on that in Domain, Range, and Quadratic Inequalities, but here we’ll introduce three basic approaches.