MATH137 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Quadratic Function, Asteroid Family, Summation

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Mathematics
• Course: MATH137
• Professor: Catherine Briggs

Document Summary

Math 137 week 10 notes dr. paula smith. As with all word problems, it is important to: read the problem carefully and understand it. Are you looking for a maximum or a minimum: sketch the situation, introduce notation assign a symbol to the quantity to optimize, and to any other known and unknown quantities from the problem. Evaluate q at the critical numbers and at the limits of x, and find the optimum value: reinterpret your answer in terms of the original problem. Given a function f(x), the values of x that make f(x) = 0 are called the roots of function f. if f is a quadratic function, the quadratic formula finds its roots. There are formulae for finding the roots of cubic (polynomials of degree 3) and quartic (polynomials of degree 4) functions as well, but in general finding the roots of f is not simple.