Math Doesnt Suck

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Jessica Newton Professor Fiske Math History Oct 10, 2012 Math Doesn’t Suck by Danica McKellar In the book “Math Doesn’t Suck” Danica discusses many important math concepts. She also talks about her experiences with math and throws in some middle school humor to keep the reader interested. I believe she did a very good job on giving different techniques to use in the book for each concept she discusses. Danica McKellar covers a broad range of topics in her book ranging anywhere from factorization to solving for X, while giving great tips and techniques on how to better hone your mathematical skills. The first section in the book is about factors and multiples. In this section McKellar discusses prime numbers and prime factorization. She covers the definition of a factor, a prime number, and a prime factor. She also shows two techniques for factoring factor trees and EZ divisibility tricks. EZ divisibility tricks were something that was new to me so, I was really interested in them they are ways to test numbers to see what their factors may be. An example is, if the sum of the digits is divisible by 3, then 3 is a factor of that number. Another topic in this chapter is greatest common factor (GCF). For this topic McKellar gives a definition and three methods for the reader to try. The first method is the list method which is listing all the factors of both numbers and finding the ones they have in common. The next method she gives is the factor tree method in which we use the factors trees from the previous lesson and multiply the common prime factors to get the GCF. The last method for GCF McKellar gives is what she calls the “birthday cake” method. In this method we line up the numbers side by side and then divide them by a number they are both divisible by, then we repeat this process until the numbers cannot be divided further, and multiply all the divisors
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