Dave

Unless something perks up in this thread pretty dramatically, it's probably going to be closed. We seem to be dredging up all of the stuff that's already been discussed here, and it's not really being productive in any way, shape or form. Indeed, it's going down rather a slippery slope atm

That code should work perfectly. I suspect it's probably a problem with your host.

It's the way most calculators work things like this out (or so I'm told). It's pretty accurate as well.

There's nothing quite like precise mathematical diagrams though. LaTeX (or at least pstricks) makes it "fairly" simple to do this. I've also been pondering things for the Chemistry forum, typesetting molecules and all that; again, LaTeX with ppchtex makes it pretty easy.

Not if b/c is, say, 1/2 and a is something nasty like 23. You can guesstimate, but it's a lot nicer if you use something like the binomial formula because you end up with putting decimals into polynomials, which is a lot easier.

Hey, don't knock it till you've tried it. I'm not so sure that population biology has much to do with what you stated though tbh; I've done models of population growth myself. A really simple one is quite spectacular, called the logistic map (I'm pretty sure people have heard of this:) [math]x_{n+1} = kx_n (1-x_n)[/math] I spent half my essay writing about this little formula.

I'm not voting for Labour or the Tories or the Liberals.

In latex it's possible to use the picture environment but I'd have to recode some of the latex module to get it to work properly. pstricks is also a great package for drawing all sorts of graphs and funky stuff. I'll look into it.

You might have seen the formula: [math]e^x = 1 + x + \frac{1}{2!}x^2 + \frac{1}{3!}x^3 + \cdots[/math] This is the Taylor expansion for ex. Maybe my answer isn't quite correct; you can also use the binomial theorem to expand something like [math](1+x)^{1/2}[/math] and then get a pretty good approximation from that.

We'll try and get some kind of java applet up and running soonish.

PS: You might want to use [math]\Gamma[/math] and [math]\Gamma^{-1}[/math] instead of writing them out

I'm going to convert this community if it kills me. I think I'd better start looking for funeral homes

That's the biscuit. Very powerful rule indeed.

Well, to replace x with a function, you have to use the chain rule (which I'm coming to eventually). It basically shows you how you can differentiate composite functions like sin(x2) and whatnot.

Hmm, that was a rather bad choice of poll option. Nevermind

Indeed it is. I think. It's been a loooong time

I know I keep harping on about it quite a bit recently, but what's stopping people from coming on IRC? I've posted a small poll about it, hope you'll all vote. I've always been a big fan of IRC, and I think for a community like this it's a great asset. Hope I'll see you all soon

Not particularly brilliant We've only had one lecture course that even covered it, and when we did cover it, it was only for a week.

Forum Rules Okay, so the "old" forum rules was becoming a little old, so I've re-written them. Please, please, please put your mathematics where it should go. For example, anything to do with Calculus or Analysis should go in that forum. Applied Mathematics includes statistics and simple mechanics. Refrain from posting non-mathematical material on these sub-fora; there's loads of other fora on here for various topics in science. Always try to use the correct and proper mathematical notation; we implement a LaTeX system here, and it would be great if people would use it to its full potential. We encourage people to post their problems here; however, if it is homework related, then say so. We cannot do your assignments for you, but we can give you a helping hand. If I suspect you've posted your assignment on here and not said anything, you're not likely to get much help.

I've not done a lot in the area of boolean algebra/logic to be perfectly honest. The only ones I really know are: [math]\neg[/math] - not [math]\wedge[/math] - and [math]\vee[/math] - or [math]\Rightarrow[/math] - implies But that's about it. I'm aware of other ones (like xor, etc) but I don't know symbols for them I'm afraid

[math]A \Rightarrow B[/math] "means" [math](\neg A) \vee B[/math].

That's certainly the answer I got.

I can't say I've ever used the top one as logical operator.

Well, yes, there is that... but I'd like to keep it all on the legal

Well, yes; in general I think of the top one being "towards" as in "x tends towards 0", and the lower being implies.