What are you favourite Maths tips and tricks?

Mel

Maths... it's the rulebook of the entire universe.

With only a few simple techniques, you can achieve quite a lot. What's even better too, the study of Maths is the study of Mathematical techniques. Obviously at University level and higher, you're starting to look into new ways to solve existing problems, but until then, it's simply just a matter of understanding what other people have done!

What are you favourite techniques, tips, or tricks that you think everyone should know?

Brad

When solving a quadratic equation, you can check the value of the discriminant first to see if it has any (real) values!

Brad

When solving limits of the form lim_(x->c) (f(x)/g(x)), check to see if L'Hopital's rule is valid to make your life a lot easier.

Brad

Never forget the +c when calculating indefinite integrals.

Mel

Use Pythagoras outside of the paper to calculate the distance between 2 points on a map.

As part of our training course, we get our developers to interact with an API to pull down data from the cloud about the weather in each city in the UK. As part of that task, we also want them to calculate the closest cities to their location.

Pythagoras makes it incredibly easy to do this given 2 sets of longitude and latitude values.

Say you want to calculate the distance from Stourbridge (a, b) (52.4590211,-2.148321) to London (51.5281798,-0.4312217) (x, y), we can simply use:

√(|a - b|² + |x - y|²) = distance to the city