Chained Product
Mandy came over to review calculus on Tuesday night. Unfortunately, she felt that she could do all of the problems except for two. I could solve one to her liking, but not the other. I know I got the second problem right, but I couldn’t get it to the book’s answer without a lot of algebra. Too bad, because it was a simple problem and I had it solved in under a minute.
It was funny, the first problem that she gave me was the derivative of 6x times the quantity x squared plus four, quantity squared.
I haven’t done this kind of math for a long time now. However, upon seeing the problem I new exactly how to tackle it: apply the product rule and combine it with the chain rule for the second half of the product. After I did it, my answer wasn’t really close to what the book said. Confident that I had the right answer, I went into algerbra mode. Sure enough, I had it right.
I guess you never forget some things.
This post has taught me that WordPress and MathML don’t get along. I actually marked up the entire expression correctly, and it was able to be displayed in Firefox, but when I put it into WordPress, that was a no go. WordPress kept putting break elements in my markup, too. I write everything in markup manually, so I really wish that it wouldn’t do that.