Posts Tagged ‘arithmetic’
Using the same notation for different things, and then treating them as the same anyway
Posted by: Gary Ernest Davis on: August 16, 2011
On the last Twitter #mathchat there seemed to me to be a fair amount of confusion about what constitutes a fraction. Commonly, people were treating any expression of the form as a fraction, no matter what were . Confusion about fractions is something I’ve experienced in many places, in many contexts. The confusion seems to […]
Algebra as arithmetic on names
Posted by: Gary Ernest Davis on: February 1, 2010
Arithmetic on names Algebra is powerful because it allows us, among other things, to do arithmetic on the names of variables or unknown quantities and find specific numerical values for those variables or unknowns. If, as some people assert (wrongly, in my view) that mathematics is only a language, then it is a very peculiar […]
