Math Is Fun Forum

Daniel123

Member

Registered: 2007-05-23

Posts: 663

Differentiation

Hello.

Feel like getting ahead of the class.. anyone fancy teaching me differentiation and integration?

Much appreciated

Ricky

Moderator

Registered: 2005-12-04

Posts: 3,791

Re: Differentiation

Differentiation is a concept that takes a while to grasp.  First you must learn about functions and limits, and then you can start to learn about differentiation.  Have you learned limits yet?

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"In the real world, this would be a problem.  But in mathematics, we can just define a place where this problem doesn't exist.  So we'll go ahead and do that now..."

mathsyperson

Moderator

Registered: 2005-06-22

Posts: 4,900

Re: Differentiation

The way I learnt differentiation was only with a very slight knowledge of limits.
Just one lesson on it so that we could do some basic derivation by first principles and then never touched it again because it didn't come up in the exam. I only learnt properly about limits in Uni.

I started launching into a long explanation here and then got dejà vú. (I'm guessing the accents there. )

Then I realised it was because I was writing pretty much a transcript of this page.
As with anything that MathsIsFun has written, it's very well explained and I think you'd struggle to find a better page on this.

Integration is basically the opposite of differentiation. In fact, if you're being formal it's sometimes called 'antidifferentiation'. If you integrate a function and then differentiate the result, you'll always go back to what you had.

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Why did the vector cross the road?
It wanted to be normal.

Daniel123

Member

Registered: 2007-05-23

Posts: 663

Re: Differentiation

That is a good page.. and no I havent learned limits yet. I shall start there... I will ask you if I get stuck with anything.