Having recently helped some students (in person) with the rules of differentiation, I’m reminded to do so here, starting with the chain rule. It is easy to make this topic look harder than it really is; the two main ways to state the rule are often confusing, and different approaches fit different problems. We’ll try …
I’ve had several occasions in face-to-face tutoring lately to refer to a past post on mixing (that is, composition) of trig and inverse trig functions. Several recent questions have touched directly or indirectly on this same general idea and extended it, so I thought I’d post them.
Looking for a cluster of questions on similar topics, I found several from this year in which monotonic functions (functions that either always increase, or always decrease) provide shortcuts for various types of problems (optimization with or without calculus, and also algebraic inequalities). We’ll look at a few of these.
Last week we looked at numbers raised to the zero power, as part of our series on oddities of zero. We’ve looked at zero divided by zero in the past, and just recently observed how 0 to the 0 power relates to degree in polynomials, which is part of the motivation for this series. But …
Zero to the Zero Power: Indeterminate, or Defined? Read More »
(A new question of the week) I find it interesting to observe the process of problem-solving, particularly for proofs: how we discover a solution initially, and then how we turn that into a final answer. Sometimes we can see the main idea in a flash, but the process of writing it as a formal proof …
(A new question of the week) Riemann sums are used in defining the definite integral. But they can also be used in reverse: Sometimes you can be given the limit of a summation and asked to read it as a Riemann sum, and then turn it into an integral. Usually this is fairly straightforward; but …
(A new question of the week) A recent question about the application of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus provided an opportunity to clarify what the theorem means in practice, and specifically how the two parts are and are not related. Misunderstandings like these are probably more common than many instructors realize! We’ll also glance at …
Fundamental Theorem of Calculus: a Tale of Two Parts Read More »
(A new question of the week) We are often asked to help a student understand a solution to a problem, obtained from a book or a website, that is not fully explained there. Here, we’ll look at a rather odd demonstration that a function satisfies a differential equation, both figuring out what the author did, …
(A new question of the week) Limits of indeterminate forms like ∞ – ∞ require us first to recognize the form, and then, often, use L’Hôpital’s rule (also called L’Hospital’s rule, as we’ll be seeing it here), or some other method. Today’s question will touch on all stages of this work for three examples, but …
(A new question of the week) We’ve looked at the concept of limit of a function from several perspectives, including why they are needed, and what the definition means. Here we have a more fundamental question, which applies to both functions and sequences: What do we mean when we say a value approaches some number? …