Functions

Hello. You might not know my name, but you see me working everywhere. I’m like a magic rule that connects one thing to another. Imagine a gumball machine. You put in one coin, and I give you one gumball. I am the rule that says for every one coin, you get one gumball. I do the same thing when you are baking. The recipe is my rule. If you put in two cups of flour, I tell you to add one cup of sugar. I make sure that for every thing you start with, called an input, there is always one special thing you get at the end, called an output. I love helping things make sense in a predictable way.

For a very long time, people used my rules without even knowing my name. Way, way back, around 2000 BCE, clever people in a place called Babylon made special clay tablets. They wrote down lists of numbers, like a number and what you get when you multiply it by itself. That was me. I was the secret rule that connected those numbers. Later, in the 14th century, a smart man named Nicole Oresme even started drawing pictures of my rules, which you now call graphs. But it wasn’t until the year 1673 that a mathematician named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz finally gave me a proper name. He called me a 'Function.' I was so happy to finally have a name. It made me feel so important. A little later, on August 3rd, 1734, another brilliant mathematician named Leonhard Euler came up with a cool nickname for me: f(x). It looks a little funny, but it’s a super helpful way for people to write down my rules and share them with each other.

Today, I am busier than ever. I help animators make your favorite cartoon characters move across the screen. I help scientists predict the weather by connecting the temperature to the time of day. I’m even inside your video games, telling a character how high to jump based on how long you press a button. I am the secret helper that connects causes and effects all around you. So next time you see a pattern or follow a rule, from growing a plant to playing a game, know that I am there, making the world a little more orderly and understandable, one input at a time.