Algebra Book Quotes

THE FIRST TEN LIES THEY TELL YOU IN HIGH SCHOOL 1. We are here to help you. 2. You will have time to get to your class before the bell rings. 3. The dress code will be enforced. 4. No smoking is allowed on school grounds. 5. Our football team will win the championship this year. 6. We expect more of you here. 7. Guidance counselors are always available to listen. 8. Your schedule was created with you in mind. 9. Your locker combination is private. 10. These will be the years you look back on fondly. TEN MORE LIES THEY TELL YOU IN HIGH SCHOOL 1. You will use algebra in your adult lives. 2. Driving to school is a privilege that can be taken away. 3. Students must stay on campus during lunch. 4. The new text books will arrive any day now. 5. Colleges care more about you than your SAT scores. 6. We are enforcing the dress code. 7. We will figure out how to turn off the heat soon. 8. Our bus drivers are highly trained professionals. 9. There is nothing wrong with summer school. 10. We want to hear what you have to say.

Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the 'creative bug' is just a wee voice telling you, 'I'd like my crayons back, please.

To my wife Marganit and my children Ella Rose and Daniel Adam without whom this book would have been completed two years earlier.

The complexity of economics can be calculated mathematically. Write out the algebraic equation that is the human heart and multiply each unknown by the population of the world.

From the beginning, she had sat looking at him fixedly. As he now leaned back in his chair, and bent his deep-set eyes upon her in his turn, perhaps he might have seen one wavering moment in her, when she was impelled to throw herself upon his breast, and give him the pent-up confidences of her heart. But, to see it, he must have overleaped at a bound the artificial barriers he had for many years been erecting, between himself and all those subtle essences of humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck. The barriers were too many and too high for such a leap. With his unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face, he hardened her again; and the moment shot away into the plumbless depths of the past, to mingle with all the lost opportunities that are drowned there.

Algebra is numbers forgetting why they’re letters.

The word 'algebra' derives from Al-Khawarizmi's book title "al-jabr", meaning "completion"; balancing both sides to find a solution

I knew that iridium-193 was one of two stable isotopes of iridium, a very rare, very dense metal, but I didn't know that the periodic table even existed. I knew how many zeroes there were in a quintillion, but I thought that algebra lived in ponds. I'd picked up a few Latin words, and a smattering of Elvish, but my French was non-existent. I'd read more than one book of more than one thousand pages (more than once), but I wouldn't have been able to identify a metaphor if it poked me in the eye. By secondary-school standards, I was quite a dunce.

There have been complaints?' said Miss Susan. 'Er, no ... er ... although Miss Smith has told me that the children coming up from your class are, er, restless. Their reading ability is, she says, rather unfortunately advanced ...' 'Miss Smith thinks a good book is about a boy and his dog chasing a big red ball,' said Miss Susan. 'My children have learned to expect a plot. No wonder they get impatient. We're reading Grim Fairy Tales at the moment.' 'That is rather rude of you, Susan.' 'No, madam. That is rather polite of me. It would have been rude of me to say that there is a circle of Hell reserved for teachers like Miss Smith.' 'But that's a dreadf---' Madam Frout stopped, and began again. 'You should not be teaching them to read at all yet!' she snapped. [...] 'I mean,' the headmistress mumbled, 'childhood is a time for play and---' 'Learning,' said Miss Susan. 'Learning through play,' said Madam Frout, grateful to find familiar territory. 'After all, kittens and puppies---' '---grow up to be cats and dogs, which are even less interesting,' said Miss Susan, 'whereas children should grow up to be adults.'" [...] 'What precisely was it you wanted, madam?' she said. It's just that I've left the class doing algebra, and they get restless when they've finished.' 'Algebra?' said Madam Frout [...] 'But that's far too difficult for seven-year-olds!' 'Yes, but I didn't tell them that and so far they haven't found out,' said Susan.

People who argue about how smart whales are, or whether they are as smart as humans, kind of miss the point. Whales will never read books or build rockets or do algebra. In all those areas, humans are smarter. Humans are the great brains of planet Earth. But it isn’t necessary to believe whales are as smart as humans to believe that they are great. They don’t have to know words to sing songs. They don’t have to be anything but what they are to be magnificent. And even though I don’t really know what a soul is, I know this—if humans have them, then so do whales.

Which books are ruined?” I asked Margot, who was going through them. “Algebra,” Margot said. But as luck would have it, my algebra book wasn’t entirely ruined. I wish it had fallen right in the vase. I’ve never loathed any book as much as that one.

TEN MORE LIES THEY TELL YOU IN HIGH SCHOOL 1. You will use algebra in your adult lives. 2. Driving to school is a privilege that can be taken away. 3. Students must stay on campus during lunch. 4. The new text books will arrive any day now. 5. Colleges care more about you than your SAT scores. 6. We are enforcing the dress code. 7. We will figure out how to turn off the heat soon. 8. Our bus drivers are highly trained professionals. 9. There is nothing wrong with summer school. 10. We want to hear what you have to say.

The semanticists maintained that everything depends on how you interpret the words “potato,” “is” and “moving.” Since the key here is the operational copula “is,” one must examine “is” rigorously. Whereupon they set to work on an Encyclopedia of Cosmic Semasiology, devoting the first four volumes to a discussion of the operational referents of “is.” The neopositivists maintained that it is not clusters of potatoes one directly perceives, but clusters of sensory impressions. Then, employing symbolic logic, they created terms for “cluster of impressions” and “cluster of potatoes,” devised a special calculus of propositions all in algebraic signs and after using up several seas of ink reached the mathematically precise and absolutely undeniable conclusion that 0=0.

The beginnings of Algebra I found far more difficult, perhaps as a result of bad teaching, I was made to learn by heart: 'The square of the sum of two numbers is equal to the sum of their squares increased by twice their product.' I had not the vaguest idea what this meant, and when I could not remember the words, my tutor threw the book at my head, which did not stimulate my intellect in any way.

You ready, then?” Maddie asked her friend with a meaningful look. It was hard to say exactly what she was referring to. Ready for what? School? New friends? Life? In the mood Alana was in, she felt ready for anything … except maybe algebra.

Because it is bad enough living with a neurotic cat, a drum-playing Algebra teacher, and a woman in her last trimester of pregnancy. Throw in a dowager princess of Genovia, and I’m sorry: Book me a room on the twenty-first floor of Bellevue, because it’s the funny farm for me.

Someties it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and think of what to say; but the "worthless" books come in day after day, like the cries and truck sounds from the street, and there is nothing that anyone could think of that is good enough for them. In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art:. it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with "This is a poem" scrawled on them in lipstick. After a while one is embarrassed not so much for them as for poetry, which is for these poor poets one more of the openings against which everyone in the end beats his brains out; and one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write - a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize. If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems - people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets - it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry.

Long before the Italian Renaissance, the Islamic caliphs realized that the Greeks and Romans had been onto something with that book-learning stuff, and they used this realization to revolutionize astronomy, literature, physics, philosophy, and architecture. Still bored, they went ahead and invented algebra and modern medicine as well.

There have been complaints?' said Miss Susan. 'Er, no ... er ... although Miss Smith has told me that the children coming up from your class are, er, restless. Their reading ability is, she says, rather unfortunately advanced ...' 'Miss Smith thinks a good book is about a boy and his dog chasing a big red ball,' said Miss Susan. 'My children have learned to expect a plot. No wonder they get impatient. We're reading Grim Fairy Tales at the moment.' 'That is rather rude of you, Susan.' 'No, madam. That is rather polite of me. It would have been rude of me to say that there is a circle of Hell reserved for teachers like Miss Smith.' 'But that's a dreadf-' Madam Frout stopped, and began again. 'You should not be teaching them to read at all yet!' she snapped. [...] 'I mean,' the headmistress mumbled, 'childhood is a time for play and-' 'Learning,' said Miss Susan. 'Learning through play,' said Madam Frout, grateful to find familiar territory. 'After all, kittens and puppies -' ' -grow up to be cats and dogs, which are even less interesting,' said Miss Susan, 'whereas children should grow up to be adults.' [...] 'What precisely was it you wanted, madam?' she said. It's just that I've left the class doing algebra, and they get restless when they've finished.' 'Algebra?' said Madam Frout [...] 'But that's far too difficult for seven-year-olds!' 'Yes, but I didn't tell them that and so far they haven't found out,' said Susan.

I never got to take you to the prom. You went with Henry Featherstone. And you wore a peach-colored dress.” “How could you possibly know that?” Callie asked. “Because I saw you walk in with him.” “You didn’t know I was alive in high school,” Callie scoffed. “You had algebra first period, across the hall from my trig class. You ate a sack lunch with the same three girls every day, Lou Ann, Becky and Robbie Sue. You spent your free period in the library reading Hemingway and Steinbeck. And you went straight home after school without doing any extracurricular activities, except on Thursdays. For some reason, on Thursdays you showed up at football practice. Why was that, Callie?” Callie was confused. How could Trace possibly know so much about her activities in high school? They hadn’t even met until she showed up at the University of Texas campus. “I don’t understand,” she said. “You haven’t answered my question. Why did you come to football practice on Thursdays?” “Because that was the day I did the grocery shopping, and I didn’t have to be home until later.” “Why were you there, Calllie?” Callie stared into his eyes, afraid to admit the truth. But what difference could it possibly make now? She swallowed hard and said, “I was there to see you.” He gave a sigh of satisfaction. “I hoped that was it. But I never knew for sure.” Callie’s brow furrowed. “You wanted me to notice you?” “I noticed you. Couldn’t you feel my eyes on you? Didn’t you ever sense the force of my boyish lust? I had it bad for you my senior year. I couldn’t walk past you in the hall without needing to hold my books in my lap when I saw down in the next class.” “You’re kidding, right?” Trace chuckled. “I wish I were.” “Then it wasn’t an accident, our meeting like that at UT?” “That’s the miracle of it,” Trace said. “It was entirely by accident. Fate. Kisma. Karma. Whatever you want to call it.

In mathematical physics, quantum field theory and statistical mechanics are characterized by the probability distribution of exp(−βH(x)) where H(x) is a Hamiltonian function. It is well known in [12] that physical problems are determined by the algebraic structure of H(x). Statistical learning theory can be understood as mathematical physics where the Hamiltonian is a random process defined by the log likelihood ratio function.

In a parallel universe, I’m still at Browick. I have another single in Gould, bigger this time, with more natural light. Instead of chemistry, U.S. history, and algebra, I take courses in stellar astronomy, the sociology of rock and roll, the art of math. I have a directed reading with Strane and we meet in the afternoons, in his office, to talk about the books he tells me to read. Thoughts flow from him straight into me, our brains and bodies connected.

Tell me this- if you could have a guarantee that your child would be a National Merit Scholar and get into a prestigious college, have good work habits and a successful career, but that your relationship with him would be destroyed in the process, would you do it? Why not? Because you are made to love, that's why. We care about our relationships more than about our accomplishments. That's the way God made us. Then why don't we live that way? Why, come a damp and gloomy day in March, do we yell over a  math lesson or lose our temper over a writing assignment? Why do we see the lessons left to finish and get lost in an anxiety-ridden haze? We forget that we are dealing with a soul, a precious child bearing the Image of God, and all we can see is that there are only a few months left to the school year and we are still only halfway through the math book. When you are performing mommy triage- that is, when you have a crisis moment and have to figure out which fire to put out first- always choose your child. It's just a math lesson. It's only a writing assignment. It's a Latin declension. Nothing more. But your child? He is God's. And the Almighty put him in your charge for relationship. Don't damage that relationship over something so trivial as an algebra problem. And when you do (because you will, and so will I), repent. We like to feed our egos. When our children perform well, we can puff up with satisfaction and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done. But as important as it is to give our children a solid education (and it is important, don't misunderstand me), it is far more important that we love them well.  Our children need to know that the most important thing about them is not whether they finished their science curriculum or score well on the SAT. Their worth is not bound up in a booklist or a test score. Take a moment. Take ten. Look deep into your child's eyes. Listen, even when you're bored. Break out a board game or an old picture book you haven't read in ages. Resting in Him means relaxing into the knowledge that He has put these children in our care to nurture. And nurturing looks different than charging through the checklist all angst-like. Your children are not ordinary kids or ordinary people, because there are no ordinary kids or ordinary people. They are little reflections of the

When Benjamin Bloom studied his 120 world-class concert pianists, sculptors, swimmers, tennis players, mathematicians, and research neurologists, he found something fascinating. For most of them, their first teachers were incredibly warm and accepting. Not that they set low standards. Not at all, but they created an atmosphere of trust, not judgment. It was, “I’m going to teach you,” not “I’m going to judge your talent.” As you look at what Collins and Esquith demanded of their students—all their students—it’s almost shocking. When Collins expanded her school to include young children, she required that every four-year-old who started in September be reading by Christmas. And they all were. The three- and four-year-olds used a vocabulary book titled Vocabulary for the High School Student. The seven-year-olds were reading The Wall Street Journal. For older children, a discussion of Plato’s Republic led to discussions of de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Orwell’s Animal Farm, Machiavelli, and the Chicago city council. Her reading list for the late-grade-school children included The Complete Plays of Anton Chekhov, Physics Through Experiment, and The Canterbury Tales. Oh, and always Shakespeare. Even the boys who picked their teeth with switchblades, she says, loved Shakespeare and always begged for more. Yet Collins maintained an extremely nurturing atmosphere. A very strict and disciplined one, but a loving one. Realizing that her students were coming from teachers who made a career of telling them what was wrong with them, she quickly made known her complete commitment to them as her students and as people. Esquith bemoans the lowering of standards. Recently, he tells us, his school celebrated reading scores that were twenty points below the national average. Why? Because they were a point or two higher than the year before. “Maybe it’s important to look for the good and be optimistic,” he says, “but delusion is not the answer. Those who celebrate failure will not be around to help today’s students celebrate their jobs flipping burgers.… Someone has to tell children if they are behind, and lay out a plan of attack to help them catch up.” All of his fifth graders master a reading list that includes Of Mice and Men, Native Son, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, The Joy Luck Club, The Diary of Anne Frank, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Separate Peace. Every one of his sixth graders passes an algebra final that would reduce most eighth and ninth graders to tears. But again, all is achieved in an atmosphere of affection and deep personal commitment to every student. “Challenge and nurture” describes DeLay’s approach, too. One of her former students expresses it this way: “That is part of Miss DeLay’s genius—to put people in the frame of mind where they can do their best.… Very few teachers can actually get you to your ultimate potential. Miss DeLay has that gift. She challenges you at the same time that you feel you are being nurtured.

If literature were nothing more than verbal algebra, anyone could produce any book by essaying variations. The lapidary formula 'Everything flows' abbreviates in two words the philosophy of Heraclitus: Raymond Lully would say that, with the first word given, it would be sufficient to essay the intransitive verbs to discover the second and obtain, thanks to methodical chance, that philosophy and many others. Here it is fitting to reply that the formula obtained by this process of elimination would lack all value and even meaning; for it to have some virtue we must conceive it in terms of Heraclitus, in terms of an experience of Heraclitus, even though 'Heraclitus is nothing more than the presumed subject of that experience. I have said that a book is a dialogue, a form of relationship; in a dialogue, an interlocutor is not the sum or average of what he says: he may not speak and still reveal that he is intelligent, he may emit intelligent observations and reveal his stupidity. The same happens with literature; d'Artagnan executes innumerable feats and Don Quixote is beaten and ridiculed, but one feels the valour of Don Quixote more.

In Praise of Darkness" Old age (the name that others give it) can be the time of our greatest bliss. The animal has died or almost died. The man and his spirit remain. I live among vague, luminous shapes that are not darkness yet. Buenos Aires, whose edges disintegrated into the endless plain, has gone back to being the Recoleta, the Retiro, the nondescript streets of the Once, and the rickety old houses we still call the South. In my life there were always too many things. Democritus of Abdera plucked out his eyes in order to think: Time has been my Democritus. This penumbra is slow and does not pain me; it flows down a gentle slope, resembling eternity. My friends have no faces, women are what they were so many years ago, these corners could be other corners, there are no letters on the pages of books. All this should frighten me, but it is a sweetness, a return. Of the generations of texts on earth I will have read only a few– the ones that I keep reading in my memory, reading and transforming. From South, East, West, and North the paths converge that have led me to my secret center. Those paths were echoes and footsteps, women, men, death-throes, resurrections, days and nights, dreams and half-wakeful dreams, every inmost moment of yesterday and all the yesterdays of the world, the Dane's staunch sword and the Persian's moon, the acts of the dead, shared love, and words, Emerson and snow, so many things. Now I can forget them. I reach my center, my algebra and my key, my mirror. Soon I will know who I am.

My name is Charlie Chucky, I am in the sixth grade, I love playing Minecraft, and I am learning to become a Super Spy. My Dad is the world’s best Super Spy, and he is starting to teach me all his tricks. Lately, I’ve been battling invisible giants, crazy zombie teachers, and super ninjas! Life has been pretty crazy, and I’ve enjoyed every second of it. My best friend Harley is different to me. He doesn’t want to become a Super Spy. He doesn’t want to battle bad guys and save the world each week. Nope. He wants to sit indoors and stare at numbers all day. Harley’s dream is to become the world’s greatest math professor. He loves school, he loves studying, and he absolutely loves math tests.  He goes mad for them. It is the one thing he is really good at. He just loves numbers.  Numbers are like candy for him – he can’t get enough of it. He even asked Mrs. Jackson for extra math homework last night. Mrs. Jackson then decided to give the whole class extra math homework. Let’s just say Harley wasn’t that popular after school.  This is Harley. Mrs. Jackson always says that someday math will save our lives, but I can’t see how it will. Maybe one day, four giant numbers will attack our school, and I will defeat them using an algebra equation… or maybe the numbers in my textbook will go bad, and start attacking all the words on the pages, and I will stop them using a calculator!

The word “algorithm” comes from the name of Persian mathematician al-Khwārizmī, author of a ninth-century book of techniques for doing mathematics by hand. (His book was called al-Jabr wa’l-Muqābala—and the “al-jabr” of the title in turn provides the source of our word “algebra.”) The earliest known mathematical algorithms, however, predate even al-Khwārizmī’s work: a four-thousand-year-old Sumerian clay tablet found near Baghdad describes a scheme for long division.

He opened the door and headed into the kitchen. The kitchen table was a mess, done up in Early American Homework. Thomas’s algebra textbook was open to a problem that asked him to complete the square in the quadratic function f given by f(x) = 2x2 – 6x = 4. A number two pencil lay snuggled in the book’s crevice. Sheets of white-with-light-blue-squares graph paper were strewn everywhere. Some of the sheets had fallen to the floor.

Omit the Mouth that Answers the scrub pine dropping needles in a hush. Omit the washer junked in the corner, mice making nests in its hose. Omit his key in the ignition. Omit exhaust. Omit the mouth that answers. Omit the barn cat curled asleep on a pile of kindling in the corner of the garage. Omit the bicycle noosed to its rack. Omit the saw blade's teeth, the workbench hammer, the uncut plywood beside the rake. Omit the work lamp with its filmy eye. Omit his face gone slack. Omit the mouth that answers. Omit the algebra book open on the seat. Omit the moonlight, the cottonwood's glut of hairy seeds. Omit the drag of the door. Omit the air let loose from his lungs. Omit the mouth that answers. Omit the rise of swallows: wing, beak and claw. Omit the phone call, the dial tone's skidding hum. Omit the daylight's questions. Omit our grieving tongues.

Susan. who sat wide-eyed and silent. overawed by the presence of the great man, heard this in wonder. That she might go by train to school, and learn Latin and French, was a divine blessing, and if algebra, which surely came out of Arabian Nights, were added, her cup of bliss would be complete. Her mind flashed to unbounded knowledge, to the moon with its mountains and craters, to the stars, which were worlds. It dipped down into the earth and moved among caverns in the limestone hills and the springs running in secret places. Her heart beat wildly; heaven was there with doors which would unlock with the key of scholarship. The golden gates would fly apart and she would step into that world of books and language, and the knowledge of echoes and sound and lightning which the schoolmaster called "science".

And Ella starts rapping: Straight A's, good grades, that's the plan Study hard, top of the class Doing the best you can You won't need it but you're studying algebra Won't use Japanese, world history or calculus You follow the path they tell you to Go straight to college when you finish school If there's no scholarship take out a loan Clock up a debt kid, you're on your own Take all your stuff, you're leaving home The big wide world is yours to roam The crowd roars. She is seriously so good! Damon picks up his guitar and starts singing: But life can give us lemons and not ice cream And the path we take is not what it seems But we can't give up and cry and scream We have to turn up and change our dream Ella raps again: Science, physics and chemistry Make sure you ace your SATs Gotta get into an Ivy League Make my parents proud of me The say the road is straight and clear No need to wait, choose a career Doctor, lawyer, engineer Need to make a hundred grand a year And Damon sings: But life can give you lemons and not ice cream Find yourself against the current going upstream And all you wanna do is cry and scream Because you realize this ain't your dream You realize you have to change your dream Ella raps: Sat in class reading Romeo and Juliet But never understanding a word of it It's so old fashioned, it just doesn't fit You hate it so much, you wanna quit That's the stuff they think you need to learn But what happens when you crash and burn What happens when life deals you a blow What happens when you sink so low? And Damon sings: When life gives you lemons and not ice cream When you find yourself without a team When it throws you things that are too extreme When you can no longer chase your dream Then know it's time to change your dream And together they sing: When life gives you lemons and not ice cream When you wanna cry and shout and scream When you've fallen off your balance beam Then you know it's time to change your dream And you can do it You Can Change Your Dream

Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day they’re full of meaningless activity; by night they’re full of a meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things. There is an equal, abstract destiny for men and for things; both have an equally indifferent designation in the algebra of the world’s mystery.

Algebra deals in the generalized application of logic rather than the specific instances of certain problems. The point of this book is to focus on the logic of mathematics.

The second basic function of algebra is to convert expressions into more useful ones. Gauss’s

But Archimedes wished to determine how much silver and how much gold were in the crown, and here he found that algebra would help him. He supposed that the crown, which, let us say, weighed ten pounds, was made up of w1 pounds of silver and w2 pounds of gold. He found that ten pounds of pure silver displaced thirty cubic inches of water. Hence, w1 pounds of silver would displace (w1/10) · 30 or 3 w1 cubic inches of water. Since ten pounds of pure gold

displaced fifteen cubic inches of water, w2 pounds of gold would displace (w2/10) · 15 or (3/2)w2 cubic inches of water. Hence the crown should displace cubic inches of water. Archimedes measured the volume of water that the crown displaced and found it to be, let us say, twenty cubic inches. Hence he knew that (3) He also knew that (4) Archimedes now had two equations involving two unknowns and he proceeded to apply the machinery of algebra to find them. He multiplied both sides of equation (4) by 3 to obtain

seemed almost certain to the mathematicians that since the general first, second, third, and fourth degree equations can be solved by means of the usual algebraic operations such as addition, subtraction, and roots, then the general fifth degree equation and still higher degree equations could also be solved. For three hundred years this problem was a classic one. Hundreds of mature and expert mathematicians sought the solution, but a little boy found the full answer. The Frenchman Évariste Galois (1811— 1832), who refused to conform to school examinations but worked brilliantly and furiously on his own, showed that general equations of degree higher than the fourth cannot be solved by algebraic operations. To establish this result Galois created the theory of groups, a subject that is now at the base of modern abstract algebra and that transformed algebra from a a series of elementary techniques to a broad, abstract, and basic branch of mathematics.

The refusal to examine Islamic culture and traditions, the sordid dehumanization of Muslims, and the utter disregard for the intellectual traditions and culture of one of the world’s great civilizations are characteristic of those who disdain self-reflection and intellectual inquiry. Confronting this complexity requires work and study rather than a retreat into slogans and cliches. And enlightened, tolerant civilizations have flourished outside the orbit of the United Sates and Europe. The ruins of the ancient Mughal capital, Fatehpur Sikri, lie about 100 miles south of Delhi. The capital was constructed by the emperor Akbar the Great at the end of the sixteenth century. The emperor’s court was filled with philosophers, mystics and religious scholars, including Sunni, Sufi, and Shiite Muslims, Hindu followers of Shiva and Vishnu, as well as atheists, Christians, Jains, Jews , Buddhists and Zoroastrians. They debated ethics and beliefs. He forbade any person to be discriminated against on the basis of belief and declared that everyone was free to follow any religion. This took place as the Inquisition was at its height in Spain and Portugal, and as Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Rome’s Campo de Fiori. Tolerance, as well as religious and political plurality, is not exclusive to Western culture. The Judeo-Christian tradition was born and came to life in the Middle East. Its intellectual and religious beliefs were cultivated and formed in cities such as Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople. Many of the greatest tenets of Western civilization, as is true with Islam and Buddhism, are Eastern in origin. Our respect for the rule of law and freedom of expression, as well as printing, paper, the book, the translation and dissemination of the classical Greek philosophers, algebra, geometry and universities were given to us by the Islamic world. One of the first law codes was invented by the ancient Babylonian ruler Hammurabi, in what is now Iraq. One of the first known legal protections of basic freedoms and equality was promulgated in the third century B.C. by the Buddhist Indian emperor Ashoka. And, unlike, Aristotle, he insisted on equal rights for women and slaves. The division set up by the new atheists between superior Western, rational values and the irrational beliefs of those outside our tradition is not only unhistorical but untrue. The East and the West do not have separate, competing value systems. We do not treat life with greater sanctity than those we belittle and dismiss. Eastern and Western traditions have within them varied ethical systems, some of which are repugnant and some of which are worth emulating. To hold up the highest ideals of our own culture and to deny that these great ideals exist in other cultures, especially Eastern cultures, is made possible only by a staggering historical and cultural illiteracy. The civilization we champion and promote as superior is, in fact, a product of the fusion of traditions and beliefs of the Orient and the Occident. We advance morally and intellectually only when we cross these cultural lines, when we use the lens of other cultures to examine our own. It is then that we see our limitations, that we uncover the folly of or own assumptions and our prejudices. It is then that we achieve empathy, we learn and make wisdom possible.

There! I think it's another zombie." Off in the distance, we could see someone, or something, approaching at the edge of the parking lot. "I can't tell, hold on. I've got a pair of binoculars." I leaned inside, where we'd piled our supplies. "Well?" asked Misty. I adjusted the focus. "It's a zombie." "Are you sure? He doesn't look dead—maybe just a little pale." "Look for yourself, you'll see." I handed them to her and spit in disgust. "I can't see his eyes. He might be alive." "You don't recognize him?" "No, do you?" "It's Mr. Lopez. Teaches—well, taught Math," I said, rubbing my forehead. "Oh my gosh, you're right. How could I have forgotten?" Mr. Lopez had died of a heart attack last week while trying to teach Geometry in summer school—probably enough to kill anyone. It had been in the paper and on the local news. "You had his class last year, didn't you?" "Yeah, Pre-Algebra, hated it. It's just wrong to teach kids algebra. Still, to see him standing there...

Now the peculiar modern Western form of capitalism has been, at first sight, strongly influenced by the development of technical possibilities. Its rationality is to-day essentially dependent on the calculability of the most important technical factors. But this means fundamentally that it is dependent on the peculiarities of modern science, especially the natural sciences based on mathematics and exact and rational experiment. On the other hand, the development of these sciences and of the technique resting upon them now receives important stimulation from these capitalistic interests in its practical economic application. It is true that the origin of Western science cannot be attributed to such interests. Calculation, even with decimals, and algebra have been carried on in India, where the decimal system was invented. But it was only made use of by developing capitalism in the West, while in India it led to no modern arithmetic or book-keeping. Neither was the origin of mathematics and mechanics determined by capitalistic interests. But the technical utilization of scientific knowledge, so important for the living conditions of the mass of people, was certainly encouraged by economic considerations, which were extremely favourable to it in the Occident. But this encouragement was derived from the peculiarities of the social structure of the Occident.

My math teacher sucked as a kid in school. I'd ask him why do you do the problem that way and he would say "because the book says to do it." Later I learned algebra and advanced calculus because a guy explained the application to me. I now know that “If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself.

She hated everything. The library with its pile of books full of explanations about life; the school that had forced her to spend whole evenings learning algebra, even though she didn’t know a single person, apart from teachers and mathematicians, who needed algebra in order to be happy.

even the formidable deputy seemed lost for words – or was saving them for later. Maths followed a similar pattern. While the others struggled over algebra, Janet spent the first half of the lesson hidden behind her ponytail of tangled hair – ‘looking for split ends,’ she explained to Edie afterwards – until Mr Robinson, a nervous young teacher who had joined the school the previous term, invited her to come to the front of the class and write an answer to the question he had just chalked up on the board. ‘Why are you picking on me?’ Janet asked sulkily. ‘Because I don’t think you’ve been paying attention,’ Mr Robinson replied. Janet scraped back her chair, and walked to the front of the class with her shoulders swaying. ‘What’s the point trying to work out the answer when the question doesn’t make sense?’ she said, and proceeded to insert a missing bracket into Mr Robinson’s equation. ‘That was awesome,’ said Belinda later, over tea. ‘He looked so embarrassed! Oh, Janet, you should have seen him when you were walking back to your desk – his face was like strawberry jam!’ ‘I felt sorry for him,’ said Anastasia. ‘He’s so shy, and sometimes I think he’s frightened of us. Do you remember that time he was on supper duty last term and

Nathaniel Bowditch… the father of American Navigation was born on March 26, 1773, in Salem, Massachusetts. At the age of ten; he left school to work in his father's cooperage, before becoming a bookkeeping apprentice, to a ship chandler. At fourteen years of age he taught himself Algebra and later Calculus. He poured over books critical to the development of Astronomy, such as those written by Sir Isaac Newton. He also corrected thousands of calculation errors in John Hamilton Moore’s book “The New Practical Navigator.” As a young man he learned Latin and French allowing him to read foreign technical books and translated Pierre Simon de Laplace’s book on mathematics and theoretical astronomy. In 1795, Bowditch went to sea on his first voyage as a ship's clerk and yeoman. By his fifth voyage at sea he was promoted to Captain and was a part owner of the vessel. Following this voyage, he returned to Salem in 1803, resuming his studies. In 1802, his book The American Practical Navigator was first published. That same year, Harvard University awarded Bowditch an honorary Master of Arts degree. His tireless academic work earned him a significant standing, including acceptance to the “American Academy of Arts and Sciences.” In 1806, Bowditch was offered the “Chair of Mathematics and Physics at Harvard” as well as at the “United States Military Academy and the University of Virginia.” His encyclopedia of navigation “The American Practical Navigator,” usually just referred to by his name “Bowditch,” still serves as a valuable handbook on oceanography and meteorology, and contains useful tables and a maritime glossary. Without a doubt it is the finest book on Navagation ever written.

Cardano’s great book on mathematics, Ars Magna (The Great Art), appeared in 1545, at the same time Copernicus was publishing his discoveries of the planetary system and Vesalius was producing his treatise on anatomy. The book was published just five years after the first appearance of the symbols “+” and “−” in Grounde of Artes by an Englishman named Robert Record. Seventeen years later, an English book called Whetstone of Witte introduced the symbol “=” because “noe 2 thynges can be more equalle than a pair of paralleles.”8 Ars Magna was the first major work of the Renaissance to concentrate on algebra.

This is the first lesson in this book: economic security isn’t a function of what you earn but what you keep and knowing how much is enough for you. As the great philosopher Sheryl Crow once said, happiness isn’t “having what you want, it’s wanting what you’ve got.” It’s not about getting more . . . but ascertaining what you need and applying the right strategy to get you there, so you can focus on other things.

My old college girlfriend asked for my help with her algebra homework Unfortunately I don't solve for ex!

Algebra is another branch of mathematics; it studies sets on which there have been defined things called “operations”. An operation on a set is a rule whereby two or more elements of the set can be combined to form another element of the set. High school algebra is the algebra of one specific set, the set of real numbers, and four specific operations defined on that set, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. High school algebra is only the tip of the algebraic iceberg.

The people you love weren't algebra: to be calculated, subtracted, or held at arm's length across a decimal point.

The fact of zero He added nonstop: Did you know that zero was not used throughout human history! Until 781 A.D, when it was first embodied and used in arithmetic equations by the Arab scholar Al-Khwarizmi, the founder of algebra. Algorithms took their name from him, and they are algorithmic arithmetic equations that you have to follow as they are and you will inevitably get the result, the inevitable result. And before that, across tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, humans refused to deal with zero. While the first reference to it was in the Sumerian civilization, where inscriptions were found three thousand years ago in Iraq, in which the Sumerians indicated the existence of something before the one, they refused to deal with it, define it and give it any value or effect, they refused to consider it a number. All these civilizations, some of which we are still unable to decipher many of their codes, such as the Pharaonic civilization that refused to deal with zero! We see them as smart enough to build the pyramids with their miraculous geometry and to calculate the orbits of stars and planets with extreme accuracy, but they are very stupid for not defining zero in a way that they can deal with, and use it in arithmetic operations, how strange this really is! But in fact, they did not ignore it, but gave it its true value, and refused to build their civilizations on an unknown and unknown illusion, and on a wrong arithmetical frame of reference. Throughout their history, humans have looked at zero as the unknown, they refused to define it and include it in their calculations and equations, not because it has no effect, but because its true effect is unknown, and remaining unknown is better than giving it a false effect. Like the wrong frame of reference, if you rely on it, you will inevitably get a wrong result, and you will fall into the inevitability of error, and if you ignore it, your chance of getting it right remains. Throughout their history, humans have preferred to ignore zero, not knowing its true impact, while we simply decided to deal with it, and even rely on it. Today we build all our ideas, our civilization, our software, mathematics, physics, everything, on the basis that 1 + 0 equals one, because we need to find the effect of zero so that our equations succeed, and our lives succeed with, but what if 1 + 0 equals infinity?! Why did we ignore the zero in summation, and did not ignore it in multiplication?! 1×0 equals zero, why not one? What is the reason? He answered himself: There is no inevitable reason, we are not forced. Humans have lived throughout their ages without zero, and it did not mean anything to them. Even when we were unable to devise any result that fits our theorems for the quotient of one by zero, then we admitted and said unknown, and ignored it, but we ignored the logic that a thousand pieces of evidence may not prove me right, and one proof that proves me wrong. Not doing our math tables in the case of division, blowing them up completely, and with that, we decided to go ahead and built everything on that foundation. We have separated the arithmetic tables in detail at our will, to fit our calculations, and somehow separate the whole universe around us to fit these tables, despite their obvious flaws. And if we decide that the result of one multiplied by zero is one instead of zero, and we reconstruct the whole world on this basis, what will happen? He answered himself: Nothing, we will also succeed, the world, our software, our thoughts, our dealings, and everything around us will be reset according to the new arithmetic tables. After a few hundred years, humans will no longer be able to understand that one multiplied by zero equals zero, but that it must be one because everything is built on this basis.

He has translated Virgil’s Aeneid . . . the whole of Sallust and Tacitus’ Agricola . . . a great part of Horace, some of Ovid, and some of Caesar’s Commentaries . . . besides Tully’s [Cicero’s] Orations. . . . In Greek his progress has not been equal; yet he has studied morsels of Aristotle’s Politics, in Plutarch’s Lives, and Lucian’s Dialogues, The Choice of Hercules in Xenophon, and lately he has gone through several books in Homer’s Iliad. In mathematics I hope he will pass muster. In the course of the last year . . . I have spent my evenings with him. We went with some accuracy through the geometry in the Preceptor, the eight books of Simpson’s Euclid in Latin. . . . We went through plane geometry . . . algebra, and the decimal fractions, arithmetical and geometrical proportions. . . . I then attempted a sublime flight and endeavored to give him some idea of the differential method of calculations . . . [and] Sir Isaac Newton; but alas, it is thirty years since I thought of mathematics.

Max looked startled at her question, like a kid who had just arrived in class to discover there was an algebra test he hadn’t studied for.

It is simpler to redefine the meaning of “equal.

When you learn new things, these tiny connections in the brain actually multiply and get stronger. The more that you challenge your mind to learn, the more your brain cells grow. Then, things that you once found very hard or even impossible- like speaking a foreign language or doing algebra- seem to become easy. The result is a stronger, smarter brain.

Well, the way I heard it, you pleaded with Phil to help you with your algebra,” she said. “And since he needed the extra credit, he caved in and agreed.

5.2. Copyright and Disclaimer Copyright 2014 Metin Bektas. All Rights Reserved. This book is designed to provide information about the topics covered. It is sold with the understanding that the author is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting or other professional services. The author shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information covered in this book. The book is for personal use of the original buyer only. It is exclusive property of the author and protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws. You may not modify, transmit, publish, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce, create derivative works from and distribute any of the content of this book, in whole or in part. The author grants permission to the buyer to use examples and reasonably sized excerpts taken from this book for educational purposes in schools, tutoring lessons and further training courses under the condition, that the material used is not sold or given away and is properly cited.

Men and objects share a common abstract destiny: to be of equally insignificant value in the algebra of life’s mystery.

I try to avoid investing in anything that sounds remotely cool. I didn’t buy BlackBook magazine, or invest in Ford Models or a downtown members-only club focused on music. If, on the other hand, the business, and the issue the business addresses, sounds so boring I want to put a gun in my mouth, then . . . bingo, I’ll invest.

Continuing to play the Devil’s Advocate, I now appeal to the political algebra of Soviet strategy and Communist subversion. The Communists always infiltrate their opposition. They always try to take over their enemy’s camp from the inside. Quite naturally, they long ago targeted conservative groups in America for takeover. Anyone who thinks this isn’t done can check with the history books. It is always done. To sabotage or mislead one’s opposition, to divide and conquer an enemy, to divert and diffuse a dangerous counter-movement, the Communists always send infiltrators.

He knows that being fruitful is not a fruitless exercise, but an algebra of life where effort multiplies. He is a fruitful man who does what needs to be done. He makes sacrifices as he tends to his orchard.

Ghalib and Gerard translated no fewer than eighty-eight works of astronomy, mathematics, medicine, philosophy and logic, the very branches of learning which underpinned the great revival of scholarship in Europe referred to as the Twelfth-Century Renaissance.16 They focused especially on translating the greatest works of the Greek scientists of antiquity, particularly Ptolemy and Aristotle, but they also worked to bring original Indian and Arab works into Latin. Among these was Khwarizmi’s Book of Addition and Subtraction According to the Hindu Calculation, and the book which went on to define algebra for Europeans, the Kitab al-Jabr.17