Math Is Fun Forum

I think I might get back to remembering pi, been very busy/lazy lately.

Yeah take it easy lightning how long do you spend on here each day?

qft... Also Jane must make a realllly good maths teacher...

Well... I'm sure he would stand a better chance than the average human at solving maths' biggest problems...

Quintuple Post!!! Lightning Is Dominating! The Sentinel Are Owning!

EDIT: Along with reading my terribly explained post, check this out - lots of cool, easy-to-understand info on this topic: http://www.mathsisfun.com/combinatorics … tions.html

Hmm, this has to do with the multiplication principle...

Lets do this team by team.

For the first teams, there are 3 possible outcomes: The home team wins, ties, or loses.
For the second teams, there are also 3, as well as 3 for the third, fourth etc.

You can try drawing a tree diagram. If you do this for all 8 teams, you should come up with the answer at the end of the tree - this is, however, exhaustive. If you had drawn the tree diagram, however, you may possibly have realised that for one team, there is 3 possibilites, for two teams there are 3^2 = 9, for three there are 3^3 = 27, for four there are 3^4 = 81, for five there are 3^5 = 243...etc
The possibilities are going up by powers of 3.
So at 8 teams, you would have 3×3×3×3×3×3×3×3 = 3^8 = 6561 possibilities.

In general - if event 1 has x outcomes and event 2 has y outcomes and both events are mutually exclusive, then the total possible outcomes is xy.

Let's try another example:
Lauren can spend her night a number of ways. She can see 1 of 5 movies, then go to 1 of 3 restaurants, then watch 1 of 2 movies on TV, then sleep in 1 of 8 positions.

The total possible outcomes from this would be
Event1 × Event2 × Event3 × Event 4
No.PossibleMovies × No.Possible restaurants × No.PossibleTVmovies × No.Possible sleep positions
5 × 3 × 2 × 8 = 240 different possibilities.

Are those really true stories though? I kind of find it hard to believe that a teacher or examiner would really appreciate a 2-3 word answer, no matter how meaningful it may be.

I heard someone took philosophy, and on his final exam, got one question, and several pages of lines. The question was 'why?'.

Ugh. I do not want to do philosophy for my VCE!