What We Mean By x

[ Oh, wow. Yesterday’s entry had way fewer hits than average. I also put an equation out right up front where everyone could see it. I wonder if this might be a test of Stephen Hawking’s dictum about equations and sales. Or maybe I was just boring yesterday. I’d ask, but apparently, nobody found me interesting enough yesterday to know for comparison. ]

It shouldn’t be too hard to translate the the idea “I want to know the population of Charlotte at some particular time” into a polynomial. The polynomial ought to look something like y equals some pile of numbers times x’s raised to powers, and x somehow has to do with the particular time, and y has something to do with the population. And it’s not hard to do that translating, but I want to talk about some deeper issues. It’s probably better explaining them on the simple problem, where we know what we want things to mean, than it would be explaining them for a complicated problem.

How To Multiply By 365 In Your Head

Kevin Fagin’s Drabble from Sunday poses a nice bit of recreational mathematics, the sort of thing one might do for amusement: Ralph Drabble tries to figure how long he’s spent waiting at one traffic light. I want to talk about some of the mental arithmetic tricks I’d use to get through the puzzle without missing the light’s change. In the spirit of the thing I’m doing the calculations for this only in my head, though I admit checking with a calculator afterward to see if I got close.