Monthly Archives: December 2009

Groupings, Shopping Lists, Vectors: part 9

Posted on 2009/12/29 by

In earlier parts of this series we’ve looked at shopping lists as both an example and a model for something that in math class is called a vector.  We’ve looked at the sum of two vectors by imagining you join … Continue reading →

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Groupings, Shopping Lists, Vectors: part 8

Posted on 2009/12/29 by

In part 7 of this series, one of the examples for the use of inner product of two vectors was that of a final score based on a series of tests with different weights. We have a vector of weights … Continue reading →

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Groupings, Shopping Lists, Vectors: part 7

Posted on 2009/12/23 by

In part 6 of this series, I introduced an operation called inner product between two vectors, as a way to find the total price of an order using a price list.  In this post, I want to give a bunch … Continue reading →

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Groupings, Shopping Lists, Vectors: part 6

Posted on 2009/12/20 by

In this series on vectors we showed vector addition in this post, and then took a small excursion to show a surprising connection between some vector additions and the distributive property. In  this post, I will combine vectors with look-up … Continue reading →

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Groupings, Shopping Lists, Vectors: part 5

Posted on 2009/12/19 by

In the previous post, I introduced vector addition in terms of combining two piles of stuff, while keeping track of what kind of stuff is in our piles, and how many of each of the stuff we’ve got. In this … Continue reading →

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Groupings, Shopping Lists, Vectors: part 4

Posted on 2009/12/18 by

Part 1, part 2, and part 3 of this series looked at a particular model for vector algebra, based on some simple notions such as that of a shopping list. In this post, I want to play with vector addition … Continue reading →

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Groupings, Shopping lists, Vectors: part 3

Posted on 2009/12/16 by

The previous installments in this series can be found here and here. What I am after is a natural way to develop the usefulness of the idea of a vector, and in the previous post I suggested that a shopping … Continue reading →

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