Black Magic at Mockingbird Academy is not a science. Rather, it is an investigation into the tools and strategies that we use when we are in the stage before we have a logical procedure.
If you were stranded on a desert island with food, water, pen and paper, could you reconstruct a lot of what you were told to memorize in the first three semesters of calculus?
Specific Tricks included in Black Magic…
- Rule of Similarity
- Rule of Commutation
- Rule of Fragments
- Rule of Indexing
Rule of Similarity
If we are differentiating y=ax^b we expect the answer to have the same form:
y’=cx^d
We aren’t claiming the answer just yet, we’re using c and d to be placeholders for anything such as numbers or even other functions.
Rule of Commutation
If two variables in the original thing commute, then those variables need to commutate in the answer.
Rule of Indexing
When using a spreadsheet to make a calculation, we often find the first column is a collection of natural numbers starting at 1 or 0. We can see the each row of calculations goes back to an index on the far left. It may be beneficial to ask if this applies when trying to do something new.
Rob Sterling 