- Given: The Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio believed that the height of a room with vaulted ceilings should be the harmonic mean of the length and width. The harmonic mean of two positive numbers a and b is equal to 2/1/a + 1/b.
- To find: simplify this expression and what are the excluded values and what do they mean in this problem.
- Simplify the expression by adding the expression in the denominator, then for excluded values check where it is not defined.
The given expression can be simplified as :
2ab/b+a , b ≠ a
The excluded values are a≠b . This mean that the length and width cannot be same.