ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Growth function

Imagine you have a big bag of toys and you want to sort them into different boxes based on their features. For example, you might have a box just for pink toys, or a box for toys that make noise. As you put more toys in each box, you start to notice a pattern in how many boxes you need to sort them all.

This pattern is like a growth function. It tells you how many boxes you need based on how many toys you have. The growth function might look like a straight line if you only have a few toys, but as you add more and more toys, the growth function might start to curve upward.

The growth function is important because it helps us understand how quickly things grow or change over time. For example, if you were trying to predict how many boxes you would need for a million toys, you could use the growth function to estimate the answer.

In math, a growth function is a way to describe how a set of numbers behaves as the input (in this case, the number of toys) changes. Different types of growth functions have different shapes and patterns, but they all help us make predictions about how things will change over time.