Category: Calculus

Graph of function f(x), with its matching Taylor series p(x)

What You Need to Know To Understand TAYLOR SERIES

One Calculus topic that seems to challenge my tutoring clients every year is the topic of Taylor series.  It usually comes up near the tail end of their Calculus class, and it is touted as a method to come up with an “approximation” to a function.  Most Calculus textbooks introduce Taylor series with a scary-looking…
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Folded box for optimization problems

The RIGHT Way To Solve Optimization Problems

Your Math class may have introduced you to a type of word problem called an optimization problem, sometimes referred to as a min / max problem.  The objective of these is always the same: to find the maximum or minimum possible value of some quantity named in the problem.   The weird thing about these problems…
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