What is the derivative of a function?
understand to grasp the basics of Calculus: derivatives and integrals. These two concepts describe the inherent relationship between different functions, and they make up the fundamental theorem of calculus. Understand these, and you understand everything. To get you started, here’s a quick and dirty explanation of what a derivative is, using a simple physics example. The Function Calculus is all about related functions. You create one function to model the action of something in real life (like the speed of a free-falling person), and there are many functions that are related to it. To understand the derivative of a function, we need to start with a basic function. Let’s say we want to model the position of a person skydiving from a plane. Let’s say our skydiver jumps out of a plane 10,000 feet (3,048 meters) above the air. We want a function that will tell us, at any given second, how many feet he has traveled – or, conversely, how close he is to hitting the ground and going splat. T
