The Calculus Diaries_ How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win by Jennifer Ouellette

By Jennifer Ouellette

Kiss My Math meets A journey of the Calculus

Jennifer Ouellette by no means took math in university, more often than not simply because she-like such a lot people-assumed that she would not desire it in actual lifestyles. yet then the English-major-turned-award-winning-science-writer had a metamorphosis of middle and made up our minds to revisit the equations and formulation that had haunted her for years. The Calculus Diaries is the joys and engaging account of her 12 months spent confronting her math phobia head on. With wit and verve, Ouellette indicates how she realized to use calculus to every thing from fuel mileage to food plan, from the rides at Disneyland to capturing craps in Vegas-proving that even the mathematically challenged can research the basics of the common language.

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In fact, there is a street in the Faubourg Marigny district named Craps, reflecting its founder’s place in gambling history. There have been many refinements to the rules of craps over the centuries, but the fundamentals remain unchanged. Each player takes turns being the shooter, rotating around the table as each individual game comes to an end. Every game starts with a “come-out” roll: Players place their initial bets on the “pass” line (required in order to play), and the shooter rolls the dice.

The engine has to work constantly to overcome the resulting drag and thus consumes more fuel. It’s tough to correctly calculate the drag coefficient for anything but the simplest of shapes, but in general, at high speeds, the drag force increases as the square of the velocity. 16 Small increments in improved fuel efficiency can add up significantly over time. So driving just at (or slightly under) the speed limit can result in considerable energy savings in the long term. Back in 1974, the federal government instituted a 55 mph speed limit on highways, not because it was safer17 but because it conserved fuel at a time when oil was scarce.

How do physicists find the integral they need in the real world? They usually look it up. Seriously. A lot of this work has already been done by the generations of mathematicians who came before us, bless their detail-oriented souls, so why waste valuable time recrunching all those numbers? Most standard calculus textbooks contain tables of known functions for both derivatives and integrals to assist beleaguered students—or their teachers provide them with formula sheets. Sean ditched his calculus textbook long ago; instead, he has a big blue book called Standard Mathematical Tables , filled with nothing but a bit of explanatory text and lots of incomprehensible notations.

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