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02.05.08

Math 21a roundup for February 4

Posted in Math 21a, Spring 2008 at 3:39 pm by leingang

First, we played a rousing game of Name Bingo to break the ice. Then we got down to business.

One major goal of Math 21a is to take what we know in the line and on the plane and generalize it to three-dimensional space.

One thing is immediately confusing: we have three axes in space, and we only allow those which are “right-handed” (biased, perhaps, but we have to pick one).

But the distance formula generalizes to three dimensions rather well: the distance between two points is the square root of the sum of the squares of the differences between the original coordinates, or

|(x_1,y_1,z_1)(x_2,y_2,z_2)| = \sqrt{(x_1-x_2)^2 + (y_1-y_2)^2 + (z_1 - z_2)^2}

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