4 DERIVATIVES: THE BASICS
Calculus is all about figuring out how something is changing, or how it has accumulated changes for a period of time. The ideas apply to all kinds of changes, like pressure going up or down in a gas or stock prices rising and falling. Newton mostly talked about actual, physical motion. In all these cases, the goal of using calculus is typically to get insight into a system that is changing.
To this point in the book, we have stuck to counting LEGO bricks. But where do the continuous curves for the derivative model in Chapter 2 come from? And how do we generalize that? In this chapter, we start to answer that question and work through a few cases. To do that, we are going to use the derivative-integral model from
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