(September 21, 2017 at 5:21 am)pocaracas Wrote: Yeah, like Kernel said, I don't think it's about being smart or anything... maths is just a set of rules, with its own language set. It's more similar to learning/knowing a different language, than being smart.Red mine.
Most of the times, it's about remembering the right words to make the full sentence.... there are so many words... so many.
Anyway, letters in maths should not be feared. They simply represent a number. They may represent a number we wish to discover, or any arbitrary number we may wish to assign.
The letters are like labels for numbers, when we are not sure which numbers should go in there. Even when we do know the numbers, they tend to be so weird that we prefer to use a letter in it's place, like the speed of light in vacuum, 'c' = 299 792 458 m s-1, or the famous π=3.141592653589793238462643383279...
So, anyway... I had to look up what this "foil" business was, because in Portuguese there's no such thing
a*(b+c) = a*b + a*c... simple enough, but if a itself is a sum
(a1+a2)*(b+c) = a1*b+a1*c + a2*b + a2*c, that's cool.... how about we add some more terms?
(a1+a2+a3)*(b+c) = a1*b+a1*c + a2*b+a2*c + a3*b+a3*c, just keep doing more of the same!
You had me clear up to that point. Then you lost me.
Disclaimer: I am only responsible for what I say, not what you choose to understand.