Class Info

  • Date: Mon Nov 6
  • Meeting Info: 12p-1:40p, N700

Announcements

WebWork:

  • “Derivatives – Chain Rule” – due Friday Nov 10

Quiz:

  • We will have a quiz tomorrow (Wednesday). The quiz will have a rate of change (position/velocity) exercise, and some derivatives involving trig functions and the Chain Rule.

Topics

We first went through a Chain Rule exercise from the WebWork which involved writing the equation of a tangent line. We used this to again discuss the idea of a tangent line as a “linear approximation” for a nonlinear function:

We then reviewed the exponential function y = e^x, and introduced its derivative: it is its own derivative!

We illustrated this with by writing the equation of the tangent line for y = e^x at x = 3, and calculating derivatives of various functions involving exponential functions:

We also reviewed the logarithmic functions, which are the inverses of the exponential function–in particular the “natural log” function ln x, which is the inverse of e^x. We will work with the derivative of ln x next time.

This material is covered in Sec 3.9 of the textbook.