An odd question.. What kind of Math am I doing?!?

[jay7]

Alright, well, as an exchange student to Germany (from Canada) all of my courses are messed up. I was doing grade 9 Math earlier this year (in Germany) but since I had done all of the stuff two years ago, I figured I'd go to Grade 11. Well, now the math we're doing I clearly haven't done, but when the teacher goes through steps I understand why and where (for the most part) he puts things. However, sometimes for the things I don't understand I'd like to find out on the internet, but I don't even know what math I'm doing!

Here's some examples of the stuff we're doing.



Alright, the teacher keeps on calling that funny looking E "upsalon" or something comparable..I thought that was the German word for "Y"... Also, if any Germans are reading this, what the hell does "Null Folge" mean? I can understand it means something about 0 or no value, but I can't seem to find a translation that makes sense in English.

Also, the Lg's I am pretty sure mean Logarithms, so I am thinking "calculus" is the area of what we're doing..

Why does the teacher always round insane numbers? Like seen, n > 8.01 and he rounds it to n >= 9... I mean, I know the greater than and equal, but why wouldn't he round it just to 8? I thought rounding went up after five, and down below 4...


Thanks!

[janis]

yes, Lg is a logarithim, but that could be in a number of different areas

also, with N>8.01 example, is n always rounded up in your classes?
I could see why you would round down to n>8 as n>8.1>8

[jay7]

That's the thing, every time in this class, no matter how small the decimal (In one example, .0000001) he rounds up to the next whole number..

In Canada it was always the .5 or over and it goes up... UNder down.. Weird..I figured it was possibly just because of the area of math, ...Yeah.

[Iron Clad Ben]

The "E"-like character is probably Epsilon, which is basically the Greek equivalent of E. There is also "Upsilon" (pronounced "Oops"-ilon) which looks identical to a "Y" in the English alphabet. In the notes above it appears just to be used as constant to illustrate properties of logarithms and polynomials.

If this stuff is too hard perhaps you should move down to 10th grade math? You should be challenged, but you don't want to be completely over your head either.

[jay7]

Iron Clad, you are right, that funny E is the Greek thing. And the one that looks identical to the English Y, is most likely because in German "Why"(Y) is Well, upsilon...

I just took some random tutorials around the internet (Hey, I'm not beeing graded this year so why not teach myself...) and I now understand that Log thing..What a wonderful piece of knowledge to know the Log rules...

Things are looking better!

Perhaps I'll sit in a few Grade 10 Classes to see whats up. Thanks!!

[kyleonard]

That's not calculus... or most likely isn't calculus at any rate. If I had to guess, I would say you are either in a trigonomotry course or pre-calculus. Both, at some point in the course, would have material on logarithmic functions.

[Cod]

Alright, the teacher keeps on calling that funny looking E "upsalon" or something comparable...

Almost always Epsylon means in Math a really small number which is greather than 0.

Why does the teacher always round insane numbers? Like seen, n > 8.01 and he rounds it to n >= 9... I mean, I know the greater than and equal, but why wouldn't he round it just to 8? I thought rounding went up after five, and down below 4...

Almost always n means a natural number (1, 2, 3...), so if we are talking about n > 8,01 we can write n>=9 because 9 is the first natural number which is greather than 8,01.

[Jeremy]

That looks to me like you're just learning the basics of using logarithms in maths.

[notsohairlessape]

I think Cod's right.

In the bottom left section it looks to me like you're trying to figure out when, for a given epsilon, (n+1)/(n^2) is less than epsilon. As Cod says, epsilon is usually used to represend a very small quantity. This calculation looks like something that you might do to introduce limits. No matter what positive value epsilon takes you can find n large enough that (n+1)/(n^2) is less than epsilon. The conclusion is that the limit as n goes to infinity of (n+1)/(n^2) is 0.

I maybe very wrong, though, because if this is the case there is no reason to consider only integers.

American students typically learn limits and logarithms at the beginning of a calculus course or possibly in precalculus.

[jay7]

Well, Cod was right. I haven't checked this thread in a while. We are starting Limits right now. Sadly, in a nerdy way, I think I'm gonna have alot of fun with them. The concept of all this calculus stuff is awesome. So practical.