PREFACE

This is the math book I wish I had when I was in high school and college. If you were like me, by the time you got to high school or college, you would have learned a considerable amount of math, mostly algebra. However, you may feel that what you have learned is a bunch of jumbled up ideas and a myriad of ways to manipulate numbers and symbols. To make matters worse, you may feel that you could hardly explain why you ever learned those things, or how one thing you learned is related to another. That’s how I felt about math for a very long time. If you feel the same way, this book will give you an opportunity to take a fresh look at what you have learned, and re-learn previously learned concepts (and more) in a new light — one that will develop your intuition and help you see how everything is connected to serve a common purpose in the real world. That intuition will build a solid algebraic foundation to help you pursue other areas like Calculus, Computer Science, Physics, and Engineering.

This book attempts to present a narrative of the function dynasty: how they came to be, their purpose in life, what they have in common, what they consume and produce, their kith and kin, how they appear in various forms in disguise, and how everything we learn in algebra is related to them in one way or the other. If you are a student who is trying to make sense of what you are learning, or a parent or an educator looking for ways to explain math to kids in a cohesive and intuitive way, this book will give you many fresh ideas. It offers a lot of analogies, figures, visual models, graphs, real-world examples, and gratuitous explanations to help anyone connect with the fundamentals of math. Instead of formalism, this book places emphasis on developing intuition.

There is another unique feature of this book. It tries to explain the connection between math and computer programming with numerous examples of very short computer routines that correspond to their mathematical counterparts. These routines are written in JavaScript-like syntax to help anyone digest them easily. Computer science students and anyone who is even remotely interested in computer programming will find the connection between math and computer programming quite enlightening. You will soon realize that understanding one helps you better understand the other. Similarly, this book should help you better understand models used in many other scientific disciplines.

Finally, I should also mention what this book is not. This is not a textbook. This is not a test preparation guide. This is not a cheat sheet. This book was written to serve one purpose — to develop your intuition and help you see the underlying connections between different, seemingly unrelated math concepts. That understanding will allow you to appreciate math as a real-world tool, the same way engineers and scientists do. There is no guarantee that this book will improve your test scores. On rare occasions, it might lower your scores. Other side effects may include nausea, dizziness, and allergic reactions to dry humor. If symptoms persist, you should immediately stop reading this book and read a standard text book.

Ruchira Sasanka