Ah, inequality. That terrible, terrible thing. What does one do when confronted with inequality? Well, usually we march, protest, or legislate against it. What do mathematicians do? We work out its domain and range.

So what's stumping me tonight? Well, many things are stumping me tonight, but I feel like I'm getting into my groove. What in particular is stumping me however is this:

So I multiply both sides by the denominator:

Which gives me:

That, my friends, is not a true statement. So what did I do wrong?

And yes, the answer to the superman problem is coming. My problem has been trying to implement the technology behind MathJax, in order to properly display equations and such. The method I was using before (an automatic image generation server) seems to have failed, as you can tell by the lack of equations in my blog. 

Good news is I got an A on my 131 course! Pre-calculus algebra and trigonometry, here I come! I'll be back as soon as the technology is working again. 

My math professor loves to give us word problems. Applications of mathematical concepts to real-life, every day scenarios. And that's great! Learning how to apply math that you learn to the real world is important - it's why math was created in the first place.

Trouble is, he likes boats that go up and down stream. And every time I see one now, I flinch. More...

My next exam is on functions. Doing all sorts of things with em too:

• Operating with functions
  • Adding
  • Subtracting
  • Multiplying
  • Dividing
  • Composing
• Knowing and finding the domain and range of a given function
• Graphing functions and transforming them
• Finding, graphing, and proving inverse functions
• Defining and proving 1-to-1 functions

I don't like functions. Mainly because the two days my tonsils decided to go on painful strike was the day my math professor decided to cover functions. Catching up was difficult. I'm still not quite clear on some of the concepts, especially the inverse functions - I missed an important hour of that this past week because my alarm clock didn't go off. Fortunately, the test was postponed from tomorrow to Wednesday. So I have more time to study. I just hate missing even half a day of class with this course. So much material gets covered it feels impossible to catch up when we're barely keeping pace as it is!

The quadratic formula. High school children learn it all over the globe. I did. I learned it by rote, and I passed my Maths GCSE quite handily by having memorized the formula. Did I have any idea what it meant? Absolutely not. So, when it came time to learn it again, of course I'd completely forgotten about it. All the mathematics teachers I had before my current one taught the formula as something to be uniformly applied and learned. Like the national anthem. I could sing the words to 'Mae Hen Wlad fy Nhadau' as many times as I liked, but it would be years before I actually understood what it meant.

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