6
Mathematics
rectangular parallelpiped
is a right rectangular prism. A cube is a rectangular
parallelpiped all of whose edges are congruent. A
triangular pyramid
has a
triangular base, etc. A
circular cylinder
is a prism whose base is a circle and a
circular cone
is a pyramid whose base is a circle.
Coordinate Systems
Each point on a plane may be defined by a pair
of
numbers. The coordinate
system
is
represented by a line
X
in the plane (the
x-axis)
and by a line
Y
(the
y-axis)
perpendicular to line
X
in the plane, constructed
so
that their intersection,
the
origin,
is denoted by zero. Any point P on the plane can now be described
by its two coordinates which form an ordered pair,
so
that P(x,,y,) is a point
whose location corresponds to the real numbers x and
y
on the x-axis and
the y-axis.
If the coordinate system is extended into space, a third axis, the z-axis,
perpendicular to the plane of the xI and
y,
axes, is needed to represent the
third dimension coordinate defining a point P(x,,y,,z,). The z-axis intersects the
x and
y
axes at their origin, zero. More than three dimensions are frequently
dealt with mathematically, but are difficult
to
visualize.
The
slope
m of a line segment in a plane with end points P,(x,,y,) and P,(x,,y,)
is determined by the ratio of the change in the vertical
(y)
coordinates to the
change in the horizontal (x) coordinates or
m
=
(Y'
-
YI)/(X2
-
XI)
except that a vertical line segment (the change in x coordinates equal to zero)
has no slope, i.e., m is undefined. A horizontal segment has a slope
of
zero.
Two
lines with the same slope are parallel and two lines whose slopes are
negative reciprocals are perpendicular to each other.
Since the distance between two points P,(x,,y,) and P,(x,,y,) is the hypotenuse
of a right triangle, the length of the line segment PIP, is equal to
Graphs
A
graph
is a figure, i.e., a set of points, lying in a coordinate system and a
graph of a condition (such as
x
=
y
+
2)
is the set of all points that satisfy the
condition. The graph of the
slope-intercept equation,
y
=
mx
+
b,
is the line which
passes through the point (O,b), where b is the y-intercept (x
=
0)
and m is the
slope. The graph of the equation
(x
-
a)'
+
(y
-
b)'
=
r2
is a circle with center (a,b) and radius r.
Vectors
A
vector
is described
on
a coordinate plane by a
directed segment
from its initial
point to its terminal point. The directed segment represents the fact that every
vector determines not only a magnitude, but also a direction. A vector
v
is not