It seems there are a few of us who may have lost their calculus or who may never have had it in the first place. This thread is for us.

I would be grateful if rpenner would be kind enough to delete the shite-hawk contributions this thread will inevitably attract.

I (and anyone else who wants to) am going to start with some web stuff by P.Lutus here :- "arachnoid.com/calculus/index.html". Unattributed quotes will be P.Lutus from that text.


I didn't give a proper link because it's too soon to click on it.

What I really want people to do is to search for (9) on this page :- http://www.arachnoid.com/calculus/derivation.html

.. down a bit ..

QUOTE (P.Lutus+)

We will now perform a step-by-step process of algebraic manipulation to obtain the derivative of p(t) = t2.


I've been shite-hawked by others for mentioning functions (bodily?) so I'm kinda critical of P.Lutus for doing the same - but apart from that he seems decent enough so - here we go :-

QUOTE
As a first step, we temporarily abandon the functional notation, so that this: ....


The *** has finally arrived at the fan .. if you don't get this next bit we're in real trouble and we have to keep plugging away at it until disease, distraction or death get the better of us.

so .. from ..

(11) [(t + Δt)^2 - t^2)]/Δt

and away we go with p.Linus from there..

-----Time passes------

Means nothing? .. then you'll have to go back and read the stuff I said to miss out.
If still nothing then .. er, oh dear .. hopefully rpenner will be willing to help to clear up the mess.

Another three pages of this and we'll have Trout by the tail (the more literal minded may need to be informed that this is intended as a joke - the nature of humour is outside the remit of this thread - so no further explanation is appropriate)

-C2.