Expert: Jack Cheng - 11/17/2006

Question
I am a pastor working on a sermon for tomorrow (Friday). As an illustration I need a word problem that sounds very complicated, confusing and full of math jargon that most people (myself included) will not understand. Something one or two paragraph's long. Many, many thanks for your help.

Rev. Andy Lambert

Answer
Dear Mr. Lambert,

I hope this is not too late. I just got it this morning.

Here's the best I can come up with at the time being:

Given a set Z+ of all the positive integers, and a relation R on that set, (a,b) such that the derivative of the power series representation of the function sin (2x), which is equaled to 2 sin x cos x, evaluated at a, is divisible by the integration of the same function evaluated at b, determine whether R is an equivalence relation, such that R is reflexive (for all element (a,b) in the set of R, a must equal b), symmetric (for all elements (a,b) in the set of R, there must exist an element (b,a)), and transitive (for any element (a,b) in the R, if (b,c) is also in R, then (a,c) must also be in R), a poset, such that R is reflexive, transitive, and antisymmetric (for all element (a,b) in the set of R, if (b,a) exists, then a must be equaled to b), or neither.

I hope this helps,
Jack

P.S. When you are done with the sermon, please tell the people that math is really not as bad as it sounds. The above problem, for example, is relatively easy once the terminology is mastered (only about seven or eight, and most of them are related). It only sounds hard because I said things so redundantly, and in such a blurt (it's only one sentence). We need more "math people," and I don't want to scare people away. Thank you.