Melissa+Tindall

April 15, 2011 1. He contributed to the Cartesian coordinate system. He also contributed to the Cogitoergo Sum and Folium of Descartes. 2. I would say his coordinate system is most important because we use a coordinate system to graph everything. 3. I thought it was very interesting that she spoke Italian and French by the age of five and by thirteen she spoke Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, German, and Latin 4. Lesson 8.1 was mostly a review and I think the distance formula is most useful. I would use it in a problem if I needed to figure out the distance from one thing to another. It does not always have to be on a coordinate plane it can be in anything. If I was making a cake and I needed to know how big the pan was so I know how much batter to put in the pan I would use the distance formula. 5. y=mx+b y-4=(-1/2)(x- -2) y-4=-1/2x+1 y=-1/2x+5

April 29,2011

1. I would say he is more of a scientist because he worked with astronomy a lot and laws of motion. He played with the conic sections with his laws of planetary motion. He made some contributions to logarithms. He also gave the first explanation of close packing of equal spheres. Yes, his contributions to mathematics are still important today because they are the foundation to other discoveries. 2. You can use logarithms when finding the pH of a solution in chemistry. You can also measure decibels of sound using logarithms. Before the invention of a calculator people used tables of logarithms to speed up the process of multiplication. 3. A problem that initially gave me a hard time would be turning an exponential equation into a logarithmic equation. 4^2 =16 2=log~4 16 you take the exponent and that is on one side of the equals sign. You take the base and that turns into a subscript. And the number for example 16 follows log~4 16. Mrs Sivits, This will not let me show exponents and subscripts as smaller numbers. The ^ is for exponents and ~ is for subscript.

May 13,2011 1. To the Greeks geometry was the most important expression of mathematical science. The Greeks used only two tools when doing constructions, a compass and a straight edge with no markings. The three problems of antiquity are to trisect an arbitrary angle, to construct the length of the edge of a cube having twice the volume of the cube, and to construct a square having the same area as that of a given circle. I think it is so cool that you can use a straight edge and a compass and copy angles and make perpendicular bisectors. 2. An octagon is a stop sign. Multiple squares make up a box shape. A pentagon is the shape of the pentagon in Washington. A traffic light is a rectangle. The traffic light lights are circles. 3. Euclid is known as the father of geometry. Euclidean geometry is named after him. He wrote many books about geometry and he made the basis for the geometry that we study today. I would ask him how he became so interested in geometry. I really have no reason for asking just wondering. 4. A rhombus is a parallelogram because a rhombus has four sides. A rhombus needs to have all sides equal and sometimes a parallelogram does not have equal sides.