Baby Boom: Symbolic Computation

The Bureau of the Census estimates that the resident population of the United States on January 1, 1994, was 259,167,000 and that it had increased to 261,638,000 by January 1, 1995. Although these are only estimates that are retroactively revised from time to time, we will entertain ourselves in this chapter by pretending that they are exact. More precisely, we will pretend that the first figure was the exact population at midnight when 1994 began, and that the latter figure was the exact population at midnight when 1994 ended. Our goal is to develop a way to determine the population of the United States at any instant of time during 1994.