TABLE OF CONTENTS The language of physics and engineering, and increasingly of biology and chemistry, is mathematics. This does not mean that you must be a math whiz or a math major to understand the material in this book. It does require you to have an open mind, a willingness to learn, and a desire to understand new material and sometimes to re-examine old material in a new way. This appendix reviews the mathematics that is needed in this book. All of this is covered in a high school algebra class, but since you may have not used it since then, you may have forgotten it.
We will try to answer the following questions in this appendix:
What is a proportionality?
What is an equation?
Why do we care about proportionalities and equations? Why are they useful?
What is a graph? Why and how do scientists use them?
How does one solve a simple equation? Why would one want to?
How does one write very large and very small numbers economically (without writing too many zeros)?
What are units and how do they relate to measurement. Why are units important?
As we have seen, quantitative science seeks to discover relationships between various physical quantities. For example:
How does the volume of a block of material depend on temperature and pressure?
How does the amount of light transmitted through a liquid crystal cell depend on the voltage applied across the cell?
We can find...
