flâneur

Functions describe the world. - hayden so

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preface: I’m a big believe in mental models to first understand an idea, so here I’ve dumbed down the concepts (some might be ‘technically’ inaccurate), but the gist of it remains as a springboard for greater curiosity Part I: Finding the Unknown Even my 5 year old cousin in first grade has seen something like this: At it’s core, x is representing something. Maybe x is the cost of an apple. Simple intuition tells us that we have 2x or 2 apples (the number in front of x) and the total price is $4, hence each apple must cost $2. But it also works if x is oranges. Or kiwis. Now we take one step further: This is simple addition. An immediate answer might be x=2 and y=2, hence the equations works since 2+2=4. But we see x=1 and y=3 also works. x=0.0001 and y=3.9999 too! What is going on??? Obviously, there is an infinite amount of ways to solve it, so we obvious have to rely on one (of x or y) to get the other. Let’s decide we will provide an x to expect some y. It’s obvious that for some i

preface: I’m a big believe in mental models to first understand an idea, so here I’ve dumbed down the concepts (some might be ‘technically’ inaccurate), but the gist of it remains as a springboard for greater curiosity Part I: Finding the Unknown Even my 5 year old cousin in first grade has seen something like this: \(2x = 4\) At it’s core, x is representing something. Maybe x is the cost of an apple. Simple intuition tells us that we have 2x or 2 apples (the number in front of x) and the total price is $4, hence each apple must cost $2. But it also works if x is oranges. Or kiwis. Now…

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