Hergert Numbers: March 2020

Friday, March 27, 2020

Hergert Numbers in the Tropics!

Here's a Flashback Friday from February 2012: Renae O'Rourke sporting her Hergert Numbers shirt while on vacation in Curacao! She went down in history as the first known Hergert Numbers scuba diver.

How it all started

In the summer of 1994, I was teaching Calculus for the first time. When we got to the applications of derivatives, we talked about critical numbers being the potential relative extrema and identified them as points where f'(x)=0 or f'(x) is undefined. In the very next section, we came across possible inflection points that consisted of points where f"(x)=0 or f"(x) is undefined. I was surprised to see that there was no name for these points. So, I began calling them Hergert Numbers. In the years that followed, I taught the course many, many times. Each semester I would refer to these points as the Hergert Numbers, yet the term just didn't seem to be catching on - until now.

Hergert Numbers

Friday, March 27, 2020

Hergert Numbers in the Tropics!

How it all started

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