A gift for you:

You can try the following math sites for help with Algebra II. You can also do a google search of any algebra topic. Be aware that many sites are written on a college level, so you may have to read several before you find a suitable one.

I’ll share more sites with you as I find them and we will all appreciate it if you share your finds with us.

http://users.adelphia.net/~mathhomeworkhelp/

http://members.optushome.com.au/mmaths/explore/indlog/logarithms/bba.htm

http://mathforum.org/dr.math/ Help Desks

· Ask Dr. Math your question. (Check Dr. Math’s FAQ first.)

· Ask questions on the alt.algebra.help newsgroup and you’ll usually get answers from several people, letting you pick the approach that works best for you. A second newsgroup, uk.education.maths, covers similar subject matter but has less traffic: that may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your viewpoint.

· S.O.S. Math offers a lot of review questions (with solutions) from algebra to differential equations. There’s also a set of message boards (registration required).

History of Math

· The MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive is just what its name implies. It’s a good supplement to Eric’s Treasure Trove for historical topics.

· Jeff Miller helps you answer questions about when a particular mathematical symbol or word was used for the first time.

· You may want to look at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s list of math history sites.

Humor

· Why do do many students’ grandmothers seem to die at exam time? Mike Adams analyzes this phenomenon in The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome and the Potential Downfall Of American Society. (If that link doesn’t work, try this one.)

Subject Areas

Algebra

· I’ve written a number of articles on algebra topics, especially exponents, logarithms, and conversions.

· FAVORITE: Elizabeth Stapel’s purplemath site has many modules with simple, practical explanations of topics in basic algebra, including a dozen or so kinds of the dreaded word problems.

· Students often ask “What was that proof that 1 = 2?” One such proof is in the Dr. Math archives.

· Johan Claeys of Belgium has an excellent set of tutorial articles on many topics, mostly within algebra and analytic geometry. They’re aimed at “upper secondary” students, which would be late high school and early college in the US. The alphabetical index is here, and the home page categorized by topic is here.

· A perennial question is how to solve a cubic or quartic equation. If you can’t guess a root and then divide to reduce it to a quadratic, you can look at these links.

· Nested radical expressions like sqrt(3+sqrt(2)) come up occasionally, for instance in computing trig functions of half angles. Dr. Math has two approaches to simplifying this sort of expression, one called Un-nesting Radicals and the other called Simplifying Radicals.

· Another perennial question is how to find square roots and cube roots without a calculator. There’s a good article by Steve Monson, archived here.

· Didn’t some state define π = 3? Not quite, though one house of the Indiana legislature passed a bill to define π as 3.2.

Does the Bible define π as 3? Look here for the answer, with a history of attempts to calculate the true value of π.

· 0.999... equals 1, it does not “approach” 1; but why? Dr. Math gives a good explanation.

· Have a sequence of numbers and need to know the general term? Consult Sloane’s On-line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.

http://oakroadsystems.com/math/mathlinx.htm