Introduction to Calculus

Abstract

We met the concept of the rate of change of a function in Chapter 3. We saw that the important feature of a linear function is that its rate of change with respect to the independent variable is constant. This means that linear functions have straight-line graphs with constant slopes which are easily calculated. We will see in this chapter that the rate of change of a non-linear function is not constant, and so its computation is more complicated. The computation of rates of change of nonlinear functions forms part of the topic known as calculus.