DIFFERENTIATION What is Differentiation? Differentiation is all about finding rates of change of one quantity compared to another.

We need differentiation when the rate of change is not constant. What does this mean? Constant Rate of Change First, let's take an example of a car travelling at a constant time graph would look like this:

60 km/h. The distance-

Revision More on distance-time graphs.

We notice that the distance from the starting point increases at a constant rate of 60

km each hour, so after 5 hours we have travelled 300 km. We notice that the slope (gradient) is always 3005=60 for the whole graph. There is a constant
rate of change of the distance compared to the time. The slope is positive all the way (the graph goes up as you go left to right along the graph.) Rate of Change that is Not Constant Now let's throw a ball straight up in the air. Because gravity acts on the ball it slows down, then it reverses direction and starts to fall. All the time during this motion the velocity is changing. It goes from positive (when the ball is going up), slows down to zero, then becomes negative (as the ball is coming down). During the "up" phase, the ball has negative acceleration and as it falls, the acceleration is positive.

Now let's look at the graph of height (in metres) against time (in seconds).

Notice this time that the slope of the graph is changing throughout the motion. At the beginning, it has a steep positive slope (indicating the large velocity we give it when we throw it). Then, as it slows, the slope get less and less until it becomes 0 (when the ball is at the highest point and the velocity is zero). Then the ball starts to fall and the slope becomes negative (corresponding to the negative velocity) and the slope becomes steeper (as the velocity increases).
TIP The slope of a curve at a point tells us the rate of change of the quantity at that point.

Important Concept - Approximations of the Slope Now, let's zoom in on the section of the graph near t=1 (where I have the rectangle in the graph above). We look at the bit between t = 0.9 s and t = 1.1 s. It looks like this:

Founders of Calculus

Sir Isaac Newton

Gottfried Leibniz See more in Introduction to Calculus.

Notice that if we zoom in close enough to a curve, it begins to look like a straight line. We can find a very good approximation to the slope of the curve at the point t=1 (it will be the slope of the tangent to the curve, marked in dark red) by observing the points that the curve passes through near t=1. (A tangent is a line that touches the curve at one point only.)

Observing the graph, we see that it passes through (0.9,36.2) and (1.1,42). So the slope of the tangent at t=1 is about:

slope=

=5.80.2 =29 m/s

The units are m/s, as this is a velocity. We have found the rate of change by looking at the slope. Clearly, if we were to zoom in closer, our curve would look even more straight and we could get an even better approximation for the slope of the curve. This idea of "zooming in" on the graph and getting closer and closer to get a better approximation for the slope of the curve (thus giving us the rate of change) was the breakthrough that led to the development of differentiation. Development of Differential Calculus Why Study Differentiation? There are many applications of differentiation in science and engineering. You can see some of these inApplications of Differentiation. Differentiation is also used in analysis of finance and economics. One important application of differentiation is in the area of optimisation, which means finding the condition for a maximum (or minimum) to occur. This is important in business (cost reduction, profit increase) and engineering (maximum strength, minimum cost.) Optimisation Example A box with a square base is open at the top. If the maximum volume possible for the box?

64 cm2 of material is used, what is

1. Limits and Differentiation To understand what is really going on in differential calculus, we first need to have an understanding of limits.

Limits

In the study of calculus, we are interested in what happens to the value of a function as the independent variablegets very close to a particular value..
Limits as x Approaches a Particular Number

Sometimes, finding the limiting value of an expression means simply substituting a number.
Example 1

Find the limit as t approaches 10 of the expression P=3t+7. Answer We write this using limit notation as: In this example there is no complication - we simply substitute and write

=37
There is no complication because f(t)=3t+7 is a continuous function. But there are cases where we cannot simply substitute like this.
Example 2

We know that x cannot equal 3 in the following expression (because we cannot have a denominator equal to zero):

f(x)=
What is the value of the function as x approaches 3?

We can see that the function approaches a particular value as x approaches 3 from the left:

x f(x)

2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9

3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9

Continuing, we get closer and closer to x=3:

x f(x)

2.9 2.92 2.94 2.96 2.97 2.98 2.99

3.9 3.92 3.94 3.96 3.97 3.98 3.99

Likewise, approaching x=3 from the right gives the same limit value:

x f(x)

3.5 3.1 3.01 3.00001

4.5 4.1 4.01 4.00001

We note that the function value is getting closer and closer to 4. We write:

NOTE: We could have evaluated this limit by factoring first:

=4

CAUTION: The factorising process is only possible in this example because we have: x 3. This is a typical problem in the study of introductory limits. It appears to be a bit silly, in that we could have factored it, cancelled and substituted x=3 like we just saw. But the example is important for the concept that there is no actual value of the function when x=3, but if we get really, really close to 3, the function value is really close to some value (4, in this case).
Limits as x Approaches 0

We must remember that we cannot divide by zero - it is undefined. But there are some interesting, and important, limits where there is a limiting value as x approaches 0 and where it would appear that we have a 0 denominator.
Example 3

Find the limit as x approaches 0 of Answer Notice we cannot just substitute 0 because is undefined.

There is no algebraic process to find this limit. We can substitute values of x which get closer and closer to 0 (from both the left side and right side) and conclude that

=1
A way to check this is to graph it and see that indeed the limit as closer to 0 is 1:

x gets

We cannot see it, but there is a "hole" at x=0 in our graph.

Limits as x Approaches Infinity
Example 4

Consider the fraction Answer

What happens as x?

Clearly, if we take larger and larger values of x, the value of the fraction becomes smaller and smaller until it gets very close to 0. We say that "the limit of as x approaches infinity is 0. We write this in mathematical notation as:

Limits when the variable is in the denominator

In general:

)=0
And similarly,

We use these limits when evaluating limits of functions and it is especially useful in curve sketching.
Example 5

Find the limit

This time it is not so obvious what the limit value is. We could substitute larger and larger values of x until we could see what was happening (try 100, then 1 000, then 1 000 000 and so on). Or, we could rearrange the expression and use the fact that

)=0 to find the limiting value.

We divide throughout by x to get the expression in a form where we can evaluate it.

)=
= = , because this

Notice that we cannot substitute into the fraction does not make mathematical sense. Please do not write

It really upsets mathematicians.

Example 6

Find Answer Numerical solution: We could substitute numbers which increase in size: 100, then 10 000, then 1 000 000, etc and we would find that the value approaches 18. Algebraic solution: We first divide top and bottom of our fraction by , then take limits.

= =Joke

2. The Slope of a Tangent to a Curve (Numerical Approach)

Since we can model many physical problems using curves, it is important to obtain an understanding of the slopes of curves at various points and what a slope means in real applications. Remember: We are trying to find the rate of change of one variable compared to another.
NOTE In this section, we show you one of the historical approaches for finding slopes of tangents, before differentiation was developed. This is to give you an idea of how it works.

Applications include:

Temperature change at a particular time Velocity of a falling object at a particular time Current through a circuit at a particular time Variation in stockmarket prices at a particular time Population growth at a particular time Temperature increase as density increases in a gas

Later, we will see how to find these rates of change by differentiating a function and substituting a value. For now, we are going to find rates of change numerically (that is, by substituting numbers in until we find an acceptable approximation.) We look at the general case and write our functions involving the familiar x(independent) and y (dependent) variables.

The slope of a curve y = f(x) at the point P means the slope of the tangent at the point P. We need to find this slope to solve many applications since it tells us the rate of change at a particular instant.

[We write y = f(x) on the curve since y is a function of x. That is, as x varies, y varies also.]
Delta Notation

In this work, we write

change in y as y change in x as x

By definition, the slope is given by:

m= = =

We use this to find a numerical solution to the slope of a curve.

Example

Find the slope of the curve y = x2 at the point (2,4), using a numerical method. Answer We start with a point Q(1,1)which is somewhere near P (2,4):

The slope of PQ is given by(m=3)

Now we move Q further around the curve so it is closer to P. Let's use Q (1.5 ,2.25) which is closer to P(2,4):

The slope of PQ is now given by(m=3.5)

We see that this is already a pretty good approximation to the tangent at P, but not good enough. Now we move Q even closer to P, say Q(1.9,3.61) Now we have(m=3.9)

So We can see that we are very close to the required slope. Now if Q is moved to (1.99,3.9601), then slope PQ is 3.99. If Q is (1.999,3.996001) , then the slope is 3.999 . Clearly, as x2 , the slope of PQ 4. But notice that we cannot actually let x=2, since the fraction for m would have on the bottom, and so it would be undefined. We have found that the rate of change of y with respect to x is 4 units at the point x=2.