Function notation | Mathematico

Function notation is a useful way of writing down some instructions for what to do with a variable $x$ . It looks like this:

f (x) = 2 x^{2} + 3 x - 5

This is great, because instead of writing $2 x^{2} + 3 x - 5$ , we can now just write $f (x)$ .

We will study functions in much more detail in the next chapter, but for now let's just see how the notation works, as it will be very useful in this chapter.

Given that

f (x) = x^{3} - 2 x + 5

find the values of $f (2), f (- 1)$ and $f (0) .$

Given that

p (x) = x^{2} - \frac{8}{x}

Find the value of $p (- 2) .$ Explain why $p (0)$ is not defined. Solve the equation $p (x) = 0.$