PowerPoint Presentation
GraphingGraphing a line given its equation in slope-intercept
form
Slope is derived from the Latin root slupan for slip. The
relation seems to be to the level or ground slipping away as you go
forward. The root is also the progenitor of sleeve (the arm slips
into it) and, by dropping the s in front we get lubricate and
lubricious (a word describing a person who is "slick", or even
"slimy"). (duke.edu, 2001)
graphs in their modern form started to make their formal
appearance in textbooks in the eighteenth century. Difficulties in
printing diagrams likely prevented even more widespread use of
graphs until the nineteenth century. (Anderson, 2008)
In mathematics, Descartes is important for his discovery of
analytical geometry. Up to Descartess time, geometry dealing with
lines and shapes, and algebra, dealing with numbers, were regarded
as completely independent aspects of mathematics. Descartes showed
how almost all problems in geometry can be translated into algebra,
by reading them as questions asking for the length of a line
segment, and using a coordinate system to describe the problem.
(Darling, 2004)
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, mathematics was
evolving a new neighborhood called analysis, or the study of the
collection of techniques for dealing with infinities, for instance,
series that include infinitely many numbers of terms. Analysis grew
largely out of calculus, the study of continuous processes, which
was developed by Gottfried Leibniz and by Newton (who called it the
theory of fluxions). This work combined with Descartess and Eulers
work led to studies of functions. (Crease, 2008)
Donna Cox, an artist working at The University of Illinois at
Urbana (1998), works with using computer graphics for scientific
visualization. For the first time in history, they were able to
generate lots of accurate data, but they could not understand it. I
take the information that has already been generated as numbers and
use the best tools of our age to communicate it. (Devlin, 1998)
References:Anderson, G. M. (2008, September). The Evolution of
the "Cartesian Connection". Mathematics Teacher, 102(2), pp.
107-111.
Crease, R. P. (2008). The Great Equations: Breakthroughs in
Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg. New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, Inc.
Darling, D. J. (2004). The Universal Book of Mathematics
Paradoxes. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Devlin, K. J. (1998). Life by the Numbers. New York: John Wiley
& Sons, Inc.
duke.edu. (2001, July 14). Derivation of The "m" in The Slope
Equation. Retrieved from www.math.duke.edu:
https://www.math.duke.edu/education/webfeats/Slope/Slopederiv.htmlMidPointe
Library Middletown125 South Broad StreetMiddletown, OH 45044
