It’s been a while but hey back to math now. This week we talked about lots of stuff. More derivatives mostly. I know, surprising right? We learned how to do curve sketching. It’s pretty easy so that’s good. People were complaining about not being able to use their calculators but I didn’t so I’m proud of myself. All you have to do for a curve sketch is find the max., min., zeros, asymptotes, where it’s increasing, where it’s decreasing, and concavity. That’s not that hard. For maximums, minimums, and zeros you just have to find critical points. To find where it’s increasing and decreasing, all you have to do is do the first derivative test. To do that all you have to do is find the first derivative (crazy right?) then you find the zeros of that and put them on a line thing. Then you test numbers on each side of those numbers on the number line. If those numbers give you a positive output, then it’s increasing. If it gives you a negative output then it’s decreasing. Concavity is the same way only you have to do the second derivative test. For that you find the second derivative (who would have guessed?) and do the same process as the first derivative test. If the outputs are positive then it’s concave up and if the outputs are negative then it’s concave down. Easy peasy.
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February 2016
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