In an ideal world, I would like to have all students study limits in their pre-calculus course and know all about them when they get to calculus. Certainly, this would be better than teaching how to calculate derivatives in pre-calculus (after all derivatives are calculus, not pre-calculus). Limits are the foundation of the calculus. Continuity,…
In an ideal world, I would like to have all students study limits in their precalculus course and know all about them when they get to calculus. Certainly, this would be better than teaching how to calculate derivatives in precalculus (after all derivatives are calculus, not pre… ). Here are a few of my previous…
Recently there was a discussion on the AP Calculus Community bulletin board regarding whether it was necessary or desirable to have students do curve sketching starting with the equation and ending with a graph with all the appropriate features – increasing/decreasing, concavity, extreme values etc., etc. – included. As this is kind of question has…
Good Question 11 – or not. The question below appears in the new Course and Exam Description (CED) for AP Calculus (CED, p. 54), and has caused some questions since it is not something included in most textbooks and has not appeared on recent exams. The question gives a Riemann sum and asks for the definite…
Recently, a reader wrote and suggested my post on continuity would be improved if I discussed one-sided continuity. This, along with one-sided differentiability, are today’s topic. The definition of continuity requires that for a function to be continuous at a value x = a in its domain and that both value are finite. That is, the…
The topic of this post is continuity. The phase “a function is continuous on its domain” was much discussed last week on the AP Calculus Community bulletin board as it is about this time every year. This led to a discussion of one-sided continuity at the endpoint of an interval. Let’s start by looking at…
When determining the limit of an expression the first step is to substitute the value the independent variable approaches into the expression. If a real number results, you are all set; that number is the limit. When you do not get a real number often expression is one of the several indeterminate forms listed below:…
