“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
—from Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot
If you took calculus in high school or college, you might remember the chain rule. One of the main topics in calculus is learning how to approximate functions with simpler functions. The chain rule tells you how to do this for functions that depend on other functions. It helps you keep track of the way a small change in a variable will change the value of one function, which in turn changes the value of another function, and so on in a long chain of functions. It’s an important method, but it’s one of the more challenging topics in a calculus class. It’s even more challenging when instead of one variable, you’re trying to keep track of several variables that affect several outputs, as we do in my multivariable calculus class.
Read the full post at Roots of Unity.
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