I am preparing for GRE right now. These days, I have been bothered by math problems like permutation, combination, and function. Yesterday, I finally pick up my impression of combination I had in high school. But several math problems that Jacques does not have a mathematical resolution really bother me a lot. The only idea Jacques can contribute to my understanding of function is the express of a function, i.e., f(x).
These problems must have a way out by more complicated resolution. I went to sleep with the idea. When I got up in the morning, I thought that life itself is a function. Every morning at about six or six thirty, I would throw an "x" into the f(x) machine, hope the machine would tell me to get up or continue lying on bed. At around seven or seven thirty, the machine started to work. It tells me "Get up. It is an order." If it was weekend days, the function would not work until eight or nine, the worst is ten or eleven. All my juvenile time slept away from me like that.
Back to the point of resolving math problems. Doctor Matthew (1) said that "... in general, a function is a set of rules for taking input and
producing output. Most of the time when you talk about functions in math the input and output are numbers. If I've got a function called
Fred, and I input the number 5, Fred might output 10. If I input the number 3, Fred might output 6. It just so happens that Fred is the
'take a number and double it' function. You could write this as Fred(x) = 2x, which says that whatever the value of x is, the value of
'Fred of x' will be twice it.
You could also imagine functions that take more than one number as their input, like f(x,y) = x+y. That means that if you give the
function numbers 8 and 5 as input, the function spits out the number 13 as output."
producing output. Most of the time when you talk about functions in math the input and output are numbers. If I've got a function called
Fred, and I input the number 5, Fred might output 10. If I input the number 3, Fred might output 6. It just so happens that Fred is the
'take a number and double it' function. You could write this as Fred(x) = 2x, which says that whatever the value of x is, the value of
'Fred of x' will be twice it.
You could also imagine functions that take more than one number as their input, like f(x,y) = x+y. That means that if you give the
function numbers 8 and 5 as input, the function spits out the number 13 as output."
Well, well, then what kind of input I gave to my life? What kind of output from my function machine? Redmist(x,y,z)=? This is a Redmist code.
Note:
(1) Doctors Matthew and Ken. Ask Dr. Math. The Math Forum@Drexel. Retrieved April 28, 2006 at: http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/52837.html
