Day 4 in Mat229

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Today:

Announcements
- Today is our first lab day, concerning the Function Zoo (and an introduction to Mathematica)
- Reminder: No class Monday, as it's a holiday.
- I haven't graded your quiz yet. You do have an assignment for Tuesday, when we'll be starting the calculus of inverses, leading to the calculus of logs and inverse trig functions.
Today:
- We'll go through the lab together, which you should download to your machine: Lab 01.
  Our objectives today include
  - thinking about what constitutes a function, and then
  - Plotting functions
  - Defining functions
  - Manipulating functions (with the Manipulate command)
  - and Modeling with functions
  For the most part you'll just be following my lead; let me know if I need to slow down, or if you have any questions along the way.
- While we'll be using the standalone software today, it turns out that Mathematica on-line is another option; if you don't have a computer of your own on which you can install Mathematica, you just need an account. So please go through the steps to get an account anyway, just to make it available to you.
  One advantage of the on-line Mathematica is that your files follow you wherever you are working, which can be an advantage if you work on a variety of machines.
Links:
- Another Mathematica file, to review the shapes of basic functions, and some of their properties.
- Here's some Mathematica showing the Ceiling And Floor functions at work, to solve the Checkpoint 1.15 problem about postal rates.

Website maintained by Andy Long. Comments appreciated.