Staff

Please select a resource from the list below.

Quick Reference

• Introduction to differentiation
  This leaflet provides a rough and ready introduction to differentiation. This is a technique used to calculate the gradient, or slope, of a graph at different points.
• Introduction to differentiation
  This leaflet provides a rough and ready introduction to differentiation and gives some common terminology and notation.

Teach Yourself

• Differentiating sin(x) and cos(x) from first principles
  After reading this text, and/or viewing the video tutorial on this topic, you should be able to differentiate the functions sin(x)and cos(x) from first principles.
• Differentiation from first principles
  After reading this text, and/or viewing the video tutorial on this topic, you should be able to understand the process involved in differentiating from first principles and differentiate some simple functions from first principles.
• Differentiation from first principles (powers of x)
  This unit looks at some basic differentiation from first principles, and in particular how to differentiate powers of x.
• Differentiation of the logarithm and exponential functions
  In this unit the natural logarithm function and the exponential function are differentiated from first principles.

Test Yourself

• Diagnostic Test - Differentiating exp and log
• Diagnostic Test - Differentiating x^n
• Diagnostic Test - Differentitation from first principles
• Exercise - Differentiating x^n

Video

A transcript of each video should be available in the Teach Yourself section above.

(This site uses Windows Media technologies from Microsoft to deliver video streams. Streaming facilities are kindly provided by University of Portsmouth Creative Technologies, http://stream.port.ac.uk)

These videos require Windows Media Player (v10).

Please note: You may experience trouble with more recent upgrades to Internet Explorer (now v.7) and Media Player (now v.11). These no longer support streaming from the mms servers used by mathcentre, so we are recommending that you uninstall IE7 (IE6 lies underneath) and replace the new version of WMP with the fully functioning v.10 (you may need to find a download via google after uninstalling v.11). All those that have done this have reported back that everything is working again.

• Differentiating sin(x) and cos(x) from first principles
  In this unit we show how to differentiate the sine and cosine functions from first principles. (Mathtutor Video Tutorial).
• Differentiation from first principles
  In this unit we start to explain how differentiation works. The process is known as differentiation from first principles. (Mathtutor Video Tutorials)
• Differentiation from first principles (powers of x)
  In this unit we explain how to differentiate powers of x from first principles. (Mathtutor Video Tutorials)
• Differentiation of the logarithm and exponential functions
  This unit gives details of how logarithmic functions and exponential functions are differentiated from first principles. (Mathtutor Video Tutorials)