Relation and Function

Relation and Function

A "relation" is just a relationship between sets of information. Think of all the people in one of your classes, and think of their heights. The pairing of names and heights is a relation. In relations and functions, the pairs of names and heights are "ordered", which means one comes first and the other comes second. To put it another way, we could set up this pairing so that either you give me a name, and then I give you that person's height, or else you give me a height, and I give you the names of all the people who are that tall. The set of all the starting points is called "the domain" and the set of all the ending points is called "the range." The domain is what you start with; the range is what you end up with. The domain is the x's; the range is the y's. (I'll explain more on the subject of determining domains and ranges later.) A function is a "well-behaved" relation. Just as with members of your own family, some members of the family of pairing relationships are better behaved than other. (Warning: This means that, while all functions are relations, since they pair information, not all relations are functions. Functions are a subclassification of relations.) When we say that a function is "a well-behaved relation", we mean that, given a starting point, we know exactly where to go; given an x, we get only and exactly one y. Let's return to our relation of your classmates and their heights, and let's suppose that the domain is the set of everybody's heights. Let's suppose that there's a pizza-delivery guy waiting in the hallway. Know More About :- Subtracting Fractions From Whole Numbers

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And all the delivery guy knows is that the pizza is for the student in your classroom who is five-footfive. Now let the guy in. Who does he go to? What if nobody is five-foot-five? What if there are six people in the room that are five-five? Do they all have to pay? What if you are five-foot-five? And what if you're out of cash? And allergic to anchovies? Are you still on the hook? Ack! What a mess! The relation "height indicates name" is not well-behaved. It is not a function. Given the relationship (x, y) = (five-foot-five person, name), there might be six different possibilities for y = "name". For a relation to be a function, there must be only and exactly one y that corresponds to a given x. A function is a relation between a set of inputs and a set of permissible outputs with the property that each input is related to exactly one output. An example of such a relation is defined by the rule f(x) = x2, which relates an input x to its square, which are both real numbers. The output of the function f corresponding to an input x is denoted by f(x) (read "f of x"). If the input is 3, then the output is 9, and we may write f(3) = 9. Functions are "the central objects of investigation"[2] in most fields of modern mathematics. There are many ways to describe or represent a function. Some functions may be described by a formula or algorithm that tells how to compute the output for a given input. Others are given by a picture, called the graph of the function. In science, functions are sometimes defined by a table that gives the outputs for selected inputs. A function can be described through its relationship with other functions, for example as an inverse function or as a solution of a differential equation. The input and output of a function are expressed as an ordered pair, ordered so that the first element is the input, the second the output. In the example above, f(x) = x2, we have the ordered pair (3, 9). This ordered pair can be viewed as the Cartesian coordinates of a point on the graph of the function. But no picture can exactly define every point in an infinite set. In modern mathematics, a function is defined by its set of inputs, called the domain, a set containing the outputs, called its codomain, and the set of all paired input and outputs, called the graph. For example, we could define a function using the rule f(x) = x2 by saying that the domain and codomain are the real numbers, and that the ordered pairs are all pairs of real numbers (x, x2). Collections of functions with the same domain and the same codomain are called function spaces, the properties of which are studied in such mathematical disciplines as real analysis and complex analysis. In analogy with arithmetic, it is possible to define addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of functions. Another important operation defined on functions is function composition, where the output from one function becomes the input to another function. Read More About :- Adding Fractions and Whole Numbers

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