This page gives some good examples from our archives of how to answer MathNerds questions. These are not necessarily the very best answers we have, but they're in the top 10%. Browse through these for ideas of how to handle various situations.

Success with Hinting

We nearly always try to give a hint rather than a complete example.

Break the Problem Into Steps

Students often have difficulty getting started because they don't understand that the problem is done by breaking it into subproblems and working those.

Work One as an Example

If one message contains several similar problems, pick a representative one and work that as an example.

Leading the Client to the Answer (Extended Exchanges)

Ideally we would give the client a tiny hint and he would become enlightened, but sometimes this doesn't work; we have to give a succession of hints and corrections before the client finally understands. Sometimes it takes several interchanges to figure out what the client's real question is.

Explaining Without Giving Away the Answer

In many cases it's helpful to outline the steps involved for dealing with this class of problem, without discussing the specific problem that we received.

Answering With a Reference

Usually we try to give a hint, but some questions are things you look up, not things you figure out. For these questions try to give a reference or a place to start looking. For some notorious problems you may just want to point to existing solutions. Our Links page has online references that cover many of our frequently-received questions; point the client to this page if you determine that he can find his answer there. Our Best of the MathNerds page also covers several popular questions. Many factual lookups (such as the size of Lake Superior) can be done at Ask Jeeves.

Word Problems

Students usually fall down on word problems because they don't ask themselves "what are the unknowns"? A good set of tips for working word problems is the Math Doctor FAQ, Word Problems. The other reason they fall down is that their language skills are weak; they read the question but are not able to understand with precision what the sentences mean. For this weakness we can't help much.

Open-Ended Questions

Sometimes we get very general questions. If the question seems to be "just curiosity" you can give a very general answer, but it many cases it is asking how to do a class of problems, and for this often the best response is to show some examples.

Miscellany and Fun Stuff

These answers are probably not as exemplary as the others, but they represent some of the more unusual mathematical questions that we get.