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What is an Inverse Function?

Saturday, September 4th, 2010

If you have a function called ƒ, let’s call its inverse ƒ–1 (i.e. ƒ–1 is the inverse function of ƒ).

By definition, the property of ƒ–1 is that if ƒ(a)=b, then ƒ–1(b)=a. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_function) has a good example:

A function ƒ and its inverse ƒ–1. Because ƒ maps a to 3, the inverse ƒ–1 maps 3 back to a. In mathematics, if ƒ is a function from a set A to a set B, then an inverse function for ƒ is a function from B to A, with the property that a round trip from A to B to A (or from B to A to B) returns each element of the initial set to itself.

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