It is easy to be dazzled by Maple's authoritative-looking answers, but just a
little bit of thought reveals that we have made a mistake somewhere. The
answer that we've come up with is much larger than the surface area of the
entire earth! Review your Maple worksheet and see if you can figure out where
we went wrong.
Click here for the answer
When given an arithmetic expression, Maple first does the exponentiations, then
all of the multiplications and divisions (from left to right), and then all of
the additions and subtractions (from left to right). Using an idea from
algebra that should be familiar to you, how can we force Maple to do the
multiplication before the division?
Click here for the answer
Now we have a more reasonable looking answer: 1,018,260.48 square feet.
Alternatively, we could have used the ``e'' notation for scientific notation
and avoided the problem entirely:
| areaSqFt / 5.5e9; |
Joseph L. Zachary
Hamlet Project
Department of Computer Science
University of Utah