In sociology today, we had an odd request from our teacher. She told us we had fifty minutes to write an essay about everything we know about math. (After five minutes, she stopped us and asked us why we obeyed. That's the sociology part.)
It was an interesting question, and I'm actually a little sorry we had to stop. How would you have formed this essay?
I started off with the number 1 and defined the addition property so I could count all the natural numbers. Then I defined the subtraction property so we could have all integers. By this point, she stopped us, but I would have continued on to how addition begets multiplication, and division is reverse-multiplication and gets us our fractions. Then I would have defined exponents and radicals to make the irrational numbers, and finally square roots of negative numbers to make complex numbers. After that, I figure I probably would have run out of time.
How would you have written your answer to this? (Summary, please!)
2007-02-21
23:04:15
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11 answers
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Anonymous
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Mathematics