Posted: Feb 20, 2012 8:52 am
I know I said, I would go through the last example yesterday, but as usual, rl intervened. So, I am going to go through the example today, and tomorrow I am going to show you how to differentiate the trigonometric functions.

So, we have b,f and c as constants; which means that those will be treated as numbers, as if they were 2,3,6,-9,15 or whatever number you can think of. So, let's start with the second and easiest term to differentiate: the c term. This is a constant, and as for every constant, its derivative is equal to 0. It does not matter that we have a symbol instead of a number; the problem specifies that b,f and c are constants, and they are going to be treated as constants.

How about the first term? For the first term we have: a=b, n=f and n-1=f-1. So the full derivative of the above function will be:

You just apply the same rule, whether you have numbers or symbols. And what about the second derivative? For this we have: a=bf, n=f-1, n-1=f-1-1=f-2. Then, the second derivative of the above will be:

If you have any questions, any comments, please ask them in the discussion thread. Tomorrow we will continue with the rules for differentiating trigonometric functions.