I attended the Calculus course at my university, but neither I or my colleagues could understand what “exactly” is dx and its purpose. Thanks!
In: Mathematics
Intuitively, it’s a very small change in x.
The derivative (dy/dx) is a measure of how much a small change in x affects y. That’s why it’s written as a fraction of two very small numbers, dy and dx.
The integral can be seen as a sum of areas of very thin rectangles. The height of each rectangle is the value of the function f(x), and the width is some small change in x, so we write it as Integral f(x) dx.
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