Category: Calculus

One of the very first things taught in a 1st year Calculus class is the concept of the ‘Limit’. One (simplistic) way of describing it, is by saying that the Limit of the function \(\boldsymbol{f\left(x\right)}\) is what the function ‘wants to be’ as \(\boldsymbol{x}\) approaches a specific value or approaches ...

After learning the rules (power rule, product and quotient rules, chain rule, etc.) and doing numerous exercises, a student realizes that the mechanics of Differential Calculus are not that difficult. Actually, they are almost boring, if it wasn’t for that one rule learned after all the other rules: implicit differentiation. ...

I am currently learning about this very powerful calculus tool. This tool is of great value in simplifying some functions prior to differentiation. I will try to explain simply in my own words. What are logarithms? Logarithms were invented by John Napier (1550-1617) for the purpose of simplifying calculation; basically ...

I just came across a calculus word problem about integration; specifically, the area between two curves. Two runners, starting at the same location, run along a straight road for 1 hour. The velocity of one runner is \(\boldsymbol{v_1\left(t\right) = 7t}\) and the velocity of the other runner is \(\boldsymbol{v_2\left(t\right) = 10\sqrt{t}}\). ...

A few days ago was I wrote about Linear Approximations. These are used, as the name implies, to approximate the value of a function, usually a complicated function, by way of using a much simpler linear function, as long as \(\boldsymbol{\Delta x}\) (the change in x) is small. Along with ...

Smooth curves appear straighter on smaller scales and it is the basis of many important mathematical ideas, one of which is linear approximation. ...

I have been trying to learn Calculus on and off for several years. In the last 3 months I re-read about Limits, Differentiation and Applications of Differentiation and finally, reached the point where I am starting to learn about Integration. It occurred to me that it might be interesting to ...

Every Algebra student knows the distance formula; that is, how to calculate the distance between two points on the Cartesian coordinate plane: \(\boldsymbol{d = \sqrt{\left(x_{2} – x_{1}\right)^{2} + \left(y_{2} – y_{1}\right)^{2}}}\). This week’s blogpost is about finding the distance between a specific point and the closest point(s) in a function. ...

One of the many interesting things I’ve come across while learning calculus is the concept of concavity. A simple example of a concave function is a parabola. The left graph below shows a concave up function: \(\boldsymbol{y = x^{2}}\), while the right graph shows a concave down function: \(\boldsymbol{y = ...

In this post we are going to look at a function and find its minimum value analytically. Instead of just a dry exercise, it is usually more fun to tackle a word problem. All calculus textbooks have several versions of this very same problem. The problem: An is​​land is 3.5 ...