Tuesday, October 9, 2007

The Product and Quotient Rules

After Monday's class the chain rule was much clearer and section 3.4 introduces to new rules to help with derivation; the product and quotient rules. I didn't find this section to terribly difficult, but I wished a couple more q's were assigned for homework for more practice. Honestly the most difficult part was remembering that for the quotient rule the denominator is squared. By the way why is it that the derivative is squared. Can you explain that in class?

I believe that the most difficult idea for the entire class would be the order of which derivative should be taken for each piece. For example the product rule, (fg)'= f'g+fg'
It looks simple but sometimes when you forget, it can mess it all up. So the class has to remember the derivative of f multiplied by g, then add that to f multiplied by the derivative of g.

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