Suppose I'm a certain number of miles away, and I come back at a certain number of miles per hour. 1/
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That was a bit of a mouthful, but there's a nice way to say it more succinctly. 2/
( -b ± √(b^2 - 4ac) ) / 2a
It's important to stress that using letters for numbers involves a trade-off. A page full of letters and formulae is less immediately easy to understand than a page full of words. 7/
It's a bit like making a machine to do something. If you use the machine once, it probably wasn't worth it, but if ... 8/
And since there are many mathematical tasks that have to be done repeatedly, but with small variations, the invention of algebra as a time-saving device was pretty well inevitable. 9/
The kicker is that once it's invented, it suddenly makes a whole lot of things possible to think about that would previously have required too much brain space. 10/