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Today:
This is our last lab: you will turn in your lab notebooks (include only relevant pages, and you may tear those out and put them in a manilla folder, for example) with the final exam.
To get in the mood, let's have a look at Theorem 1, p. 639, from section 12.4: it informs us about ellipses.
Then we'll have a look at the parameterization of an ellipse from section 12.1 (Example 4).
How can we use this formula, however? Suppose a particle has followed the parametric curve : then we can compute how far the particle has travelled during the interval easily using the dirt formula, (in its modified form ).
In this case, the rate is just the speed. So we compute the integral
This is actually just a re-expression of the arc length formula:
But arc length may be different from the distance the particle travelled: a particle can revisit many sections of the curve y(x) -- so once again we need to be careful to distinguish between the independent variable of interest (whether x or t).
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