1

@EpcotMagic has created these articles that will likely be a big help for high school mathematicians. He has worked to add examples as a way to help follow the instructions, and we’d love some help testing, confirming and/or tweaking or adding to them to help make them as helpful as possible.

Is this something you might be able to help with? (Because it’s definitely not something that’s my area of expertise!)

Add and Subtract Complex Numbers (a+bi Format)

Multiply Complex Numbers (a+bi Format)

Determine a Quadratic Equation Based on Its Roots Using the Reverse Factoring Technique

Differentiate Between Factorials, Permutations and Combinatorics Use in High School Probability Problems

2 Likes
2

I’ve gone through How to Determine a Quadratic Equation Based on Its Roots Using the Reverse Factoring Technique and https://www.wikihow.com/Differentiate-Between-Factorials,-Permutations-and-Combinatorics-Use-in-High-School-Probability-Problems primarily from the perspective of verifying/fixing examples

In the first one, I tidied up a little bit of notation and fixed an incorrect sign - other than that, the example is pretty good. It could potentially be useful to readers to include an example where the x 2 coefficient is greater than 1 as you then need to deal with fractional values, but I doubt that would fit well into the body of the article. Some of the explanations supporting the example could potentially do with some rephrasing for clarity.

I tidied up some of the LaTeX in the latter article to keep the leading subscript text after equals signs from floating away from the following notation (presumably because of a bit of a quirk in the LaTeX typeset) - for future reference for anyone using LaTeX, this can be done by enclosing everything you want to keep neatly together with a set of {curly brackets}.

  • <math>_{n}C_{r}=_{n}C_{0}=1</math> produces n C r = n C 0 = 1
  • <math>_{n}C_{r}={_{n}C_{0}}=1</math> produces n C r = n C 0 = 1
2 Likes
3

I took a really quick glance at Differentiate Between Factorials, Permutations and Combinatorics Use in High School Probability Problems — I’m a bit confused since there are a couple of superfluous steps (at least in my mind). My interpretation of this article is to tell when to use permutations and when to use combinations to solve a problem, so why not just split it into two or three methods on identifying when to use each (i.e. Identifying Permutations, Identifying Combinations, optional one here, but maybe Solving the Problem.)?

Since solving probability involves a ton more than deciding when to use permutations and when combinations, I don’t see how an article can cover the process of doing so because there are just too many scenarios — and if we were to try you’d definitely need a specific article for it. Steps 1-7 fall under the article’s topic, but the ones after are mostly focused on solving the equation.

I want to bring up how the article doesn’t correctly explain how you can actually find the probability. These questions solely focused on finding the probability don’t consist of using combinations and permutations as the most important step — a lot of it (when dealing with problems past simple ones) require more than just finding the basic probability of a permutation/combination and mostly comes from creating equations (if the question is simple enough to, for ex, asking you to find the permutations of picking out 3 books in 5, it goes without saying that it’s 5 P 3 (60), but that’s never going to be the case when you move literally beyond elementary school which sets out these preliminary fundamentals. Since the article is also mentioning finding the probability, you need to focus on how you can set up an equation (for example, the basics include knowing when to add/subtract/multiply/divide a permutation or combination with the other to get an outcome and etc.

1 Like
4

If there’s anyone to help with either of the “Complex Numbers” two articles I gave, if someone can help input information where it’ll take trigonometry to solve as similarto the trig used in Divide Complex Numbers . Since I never took calculus in neither high school or college, I don’t have the background to cover trigonometric cases under the complex number system. But I did have the background for more general cases - coming from the three part course of high school math behind me (graduated in 2002, but still hold onto purchased copies of three textbooks I bought right from one of the used companies.)