What is a function and how will we represent them?
Posted by Reversearp
Hi all – since this was my first day back I decided that I’ll take care of the post for today and we’ll give it to someone else for tomorrow.
Before I get to the meat of it I want to point out that the titles you gives your posts are very important. This is because each post is saved as a Permalink which is just a fancy way of saying that the title you give becomes a part of the actual address of your post on the internet. So if someone were to do a search on Google for functions, let’s say, and you have the word function in the title of your post (because your post is about functions) then Google may direct their search to your post. Bottom line: be descriptive in the title of your posts.
Today we talked about functions and made an analogy with a soda machine. We reasoned that a soda machine is broken (mal-functioning) if pressing a button gives no soda or pressing a button gives a different type of soda with each press of the same button. Therefore a machine that functions, that is, a function is a relationship between two “things” where every input produces an output and each input produces one, and only one, (a unique) output.
We also went on to talk about the various ways that functions (and non-functions) can be represented. They can be represented verbally (in words), algebraically (in symbols), numerically (a table of values), and graphically (as a graph). For the most part this year we will try and represent eveything we do in each of these forms.
Here is a function machine for you. Choose “Random”, then put in some inputs and try to determine the rule.
Comment if you read this!
