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How do you determine the length of the long side of a right triangle? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lafaber mabel (talk • contribs) 16:59, August 30, 2007 (UTC)
Why is it that in the formula for the gradient , where you have two points labelled for the first co-ordinate and for the second, the letter "m" is used for gradient? Thanks, 81.151.242.78 17:31, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
...His answer was approximately: "In our system, the first letters of the alphabet, a, b , c... represent the constants, the last letters, x, y, z represent the unknown variables and the middle letters, m, n, p... represents the parameters. When we started the explanations of slope, it was in studying the first degree equation: y = mx + b. x and y were the variables, b was fixed and considered as a constant, and what was appended to the coefficient of x as its value varied. So it was a parameter and that is why we used m."
I tend to do the same and so tend to agree...213.249.232.26 18:39, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
While on the topic of traditional notation… While at university (I recently graduated, yay!) I was a teaching assistant at the maths department. As I was teaching my class, I used "q" for something that was usually represented by some other letter. Later, when I was processing assignments together with the other teaching assistants, some students could be spotted as mine because they used "q" as well. I had kind of left a watermark in my teaching and could see how it had spread. :-) —Bromskloss 19:14, 30 August 2007 (UTC)