Let’s say you have a division. You’ve got 3/2, where 3 might be acres and 2 might be brothers so from there you could deduce that the division just means that the 3 acres of land will be distributed between two brothers. Summation and multiplication are quite straight forward, but what the hell does one do with multiplication and exponentiation? If I got 20 N-m of torque, wtf does the multiplication tells me there? If something follows a square root?
Please feel free to add any other operations to these. Thanks!
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The concept is called Dimensional Analysis. You probably learned about it in HS physics. Just as the operation applies to the numbers, the operation applies to the dimensions.
I used to apply this through calculations to check if the answer made sense – if I lost the way through the problem, the dimensions would not agree with what i was trying to solve.
Miles / hour = velocity or speed
acres / brother
velocity or speed = distance/time
mass * (distance/time)*(distance/time) = Force
velocity^(2) = acceleration
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