Uncategorized

Collection of Desmos Graphs – Part 5

Posted on by Sam
So I broke the streak that I had since 2019 of posting these before the end of the year. I never thought the day would come, but due to the struggles of employment and graduate level study of two difficult disciplines, my Desmos use dramatically decreased in 2023. Naturally, there are still plenty of graphs to choose from. I'm going to exclude graphs from the new Geometry tool, because I made most of them while working as a contractor for Desmos. They're listed here. 2023 saw the release of Bet...
Read More

The Last Time I’ll Ever Think About Factoring

Posted on by Sam
Factoring quadratics is a completely solved problem. Any polynomial of degree $n$ breaks into $n$ linear factors in the splitting field of its ring of coefficients. That's cool, but in practice, it's nice to have a direct way to break a quadratic in $\mathbb{Z}[x]/(x^{3})$ into its two linear factors without exactly solving for the roots.* Say we have a quadratic $Ax^2+Bx+C$ with two solutions $x=-p/q$ and $x=-r/s$. Then we have the following: $$ \left(x+\frac{p}{q}\right)\left(x+\frac{r...
Read More

Collection of Desmos Graphs – Part 3

Posted on by Sam
As is tradition, I'll share a few of my favorite recent Desmos graphs. Since last year, Desmos has done some significant updates, including performance improvements and new feature implementations. The largest new features are polygon lists, actions, and list comprehensions, which essentially trivialize many things that were previously difficult on Desmos. While this is obviously great for Desmos (and the calculator is much better as a result), it takes away a lot of the challenge. Creating an ...
Read More