Mathematical Models

Remember those word problems you hated as a kid? They went something like this: If a boat moving upstream in a river flowing at 2 miles an hour takes 4 hours to travel 3 miles, how many people were in the boat? These exercises were designed to teach you how to generate and apply mathematical models. And despite this early training, you do use mathematical models today. You just don't do it formally.

For example, suppose your boss asks you how much it would cost to run batches of 1,000, 2,000, or 3,000 audio CDs. You know that it costs $1,000 to set up the run and a dollar to make each CD once the run begins, so your total cost would be $1,000 plus $1 times the number of CDs, giving you $2,000, $3,000, and $4,000 for the three ...

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