Chapter 6 The Derivative
“In my free time, I do differential and integral calculus.”―Karl Marx
In calculus, you likely spent a lot of time and effort on derivatives. We will spend much less time, mostly because the computational skills you learned in calculus tell much of the story. We’ll focus, instead, on the foundational questions of
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what the derivative is, and
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when we know that a derivative exists.
We’ll also encounter some pretty subtle distinctions between different notions of smoothness.
