Most high school students come to math class equipped with the best calculator money can buy. Armed with their trusty calculator, no equation is too large or too complex to solve.Enlightened by their teachers who say they will use all these math equations into adulthood, they study hard and soak up the information like sponges.But unless you're a math professor, an engineer, or something equally as math-dependant, you won't need to use your scientific calculator to solve quadratic functions or parabola problems.The average Joe's real-life scenario mostly require … [Read more...]

Even in a second-semester calculus class, determining the sum of an infinite series is beyond the scope of what you'll typically be asked to do.One exception to this, however, is when you're working with an infinite geometric series, and you need to determine whether its sum is finite or infinite.For example, if you have 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 … the sum of this infinite series will ultimately approach – that is, converge upon – 1/2, and that makes its sum finite.Image source: ​Desmos​​​On the other hand, if you have 10 + 20 + 40 + 80 … the sum of the series only continues to … [Read more...]

Imagine you have an x-y graph with a plotted line running from left to right. In addition to marking these specific data points, you may need to calculate the area of the region under the line. While this is easy enough to do with a straight line, a curving, irregular line is more problematic. This is where the trapezoidal rule comes into play.The trapezoidal rule creates a series of side-by-side, left-to-right trapezoids under the curve. All the individual trapezoid areas are then added together to calculate the total area under the x-y points making up the curving … [Read more...]