Maths for Programmers 1 Rearranging Equations

Straight forward instructions on how to rearrange algebraic equations, all wrapped up in a nice free PDF to download. Don’t fear maths or algebra again!

Become better at maths!

Are you able to write perfectly functional code, but find the language of mathematics somewhat confusing and hard to make sense of? Are you someone who can look at code like this:

int total = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
    total += i * 10;
}Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

but have a complete failing of understanding when presented with equations like this

or can take an equation suchas speed = distance / time and use it, but have problems when needing to rearrange the equation to work out the distance travelled?

Me too, and it’s annoying. So what I’m doing is (re)learning some basic maths and creating pretty documents explaining it. The first one can be foundbehind the link below. It explains how to rearrange equations, including how to deal with fractions. Using this should help you in rearranging simplealgebraic equations so that they give the answers you need.

As I learn more maths concepts, they’ll be turned into PDFs and put up here too. I’m not a mathematician, I’m a programmer so where possible thiswill be explained with the minimum of maths jargon. I’ll translate it into computing jargon instead. However, over time I’m sure the maths jargonwill start to make sense.