Wong Bobson - Practical Algebra: A Self-Teaching Guide

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4
5. Chapter 5
6. Chapter 6
7. Chapter 7
8. Chapter 8
9. Chapter 9
10. Chapter 10
11. Chapter 11
12. Chapter 12
13. Chapter 13

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4
5. Chapter 5
6. Chapter 6
7. Chapter 7
8. Chapter 8
9. Chapter 9
10. Chapter 10
11. Chapter 11
12. Chapter 12
13. Chapter 13

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All the Math You'll Ever Need: A Self-Teaching Guide, by Steve Slavin

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Practical Algebra: A Self-Teaching Guide, Second Edition, by Peter H. Selby and Steve Slavin

Quick Algebra Review: A Self-Teaching Guide, by Peter H. Selby and Steve Slavin

Quick Arithmetic: A Self-Teaching Guide, by Robert A. Carman and Marilyn J. Carman

Quick Business Math: A Self-Teaching Guide, by Steve Slavin

Quick Calculus: A Self-Teaching Guide, Second Edition, by Daniel Kleppner and Norman Ramsey

Statistics: A Self-Teaching Guide, by Donald Koosis

Third Edition

Bobson Wong

Larisa Bukalov

Steve Slavin

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Writing a book is hard. Writing a book while teaching full-time during a pandemic is even harder. Fortunately, many people helped make this edition of Practical Algebra a reality. Our students' mathematical struggles and joys over the years inspired us to write this book. Conversations with our colleagues at Bayside High School and Math for America helped us develop many of the ideas and techniques we describe. Bayside students Juliana Campopiano and Queena Yue helped us proofread the text. The team at Desmos designed a powerful online graphing tool that we used to create the graphs in this book. The staff at John Wiley & Sons (especially Pete Gaughan, Christine O'Connor, Riley Harding, Julie Kerr, and Mackenzie Thompson) have been especially patient and supportive. Larry Ferlazzo introduced us to publishing math books, opening up countless opportunities. Finally, our spouses and children deserve special mention for tolerating our conversations about this book, peppering us with mathematical questions over the years, and helping to keep our work in perspective.

What is algebra? You may associate it with solving equations such as 2x + 7 = 19. However, both the history of algebra and the way that it's taught today show that algebra is much more. For thousands of years, people solved algebraic problems without symbols such as x and +. By the 9th century, people including the Persian mathematician Muammad ibn Ms al-Khwrizm had popularized the idea of using an algorithm (a set of well-defined instructions) to determine unknown quantities. In fact, the word algebra comes from the Arab word al-jabr, meaning the reduction, from the title of al-Khwrizm's most famous mathematical text, Kitb al-jabr wa al-muqbalah. Symbolic notation didn't become widespread until European mathematicians such as Franois Vite and Ren Descartes developed them in the 16th and 17th centuries. Nowadays, algebra courses include not just equations but also functions (the special rules that define mathematical relationships) and real-world modeling with statistics. In short, today's algebra students must know how to understand word problems, make and interpret graphs, create and solve equations, and draw appropriate conclusions from data.