Title: 11_1 Introducing Differentiation
Course: HELM Workbooks 2023-2024 > Section: HELM 11: Differentiation

Differentiation is a technique which can be used for analysing the way in which functions change. In particular, it measures how rapidly a function is changing at any point. In engineering applications the function may, for example, represent the magnetic field strength of a motor, the voltage across a capacitor, the temperature of a chemical mix, and it is often important to know how quickly these quantities change.

In this Section we explain what is meant by the gradient of a curve and introduce differentiation as a method for finding the gradient at any point.