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Nice :)

Cute but I would not write home about it!!!

I was dabbling with DEFINING NEW TRIG FUNCTIONS recently, and I tell you that coming up with zinger functions IS NOT EASY!!!

Namir

How did our space program ever get going without them?! Idiotic.

Very idiotic!!!!

Yeah, but they have fun names! My favorite semi-obscure mathematics terms are 'subtrahend' and 'minuend'. I think everyone from my generation learned them in grade school in the USA but most promptly forgot them since they were never used again. I always thought that they would make excellent names for a pair of small dogs.

Edited: 14 Sept 2013, 9:10 p.m.

Obscure? I filled entire pages of subtrahend and minuend in my firsts grades, just to memorize those terms. Damn teacher.

Edited: 15 Sept 2013, 4:34 p.m. after one or more responses were posted

LOL. I loved the Onion article.

Here (in Brazil) we call them minuendo and subtraendo. I've just correctly guessed what the latter should be in Italian: sottraendo. This makes for a nice mnemonic. From Wikipedia:

--------------------------------

Per fare una sottrazione in colonna bisogna prima scrivere il minuendo, e sotto, il sottraendo: 86 - 34 = 52

86-
34=
--
52
--------------------------------

These were taught in first or second grade, I think. Good old days when memory was always fresh and neurons worked at full speed :-)

Well done Gerson, A+ or, as we were used here, 10+


:)

Grazie, Massimo! :-)

Numeric grades are used here as well, but for a while we had alpha grades in high-school, which I disliked.

Some of those "new" trig functions were used by surveyors in the pre-computer days and may still be used by them from time to time. I was introduced to them when I took Surveying I & II in college. But, since I'm a civil engineer and I have a computer, I have no need for them any more.